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NHGRI Team Deposits Draft of Honey Bee Genome Into GenBank

NEW YORK, Jan. 8 (GenomeWeb News) - A group of research centers headed by the National Human Genome Research Institute has made freely available the first draft of the honey bee genome sequence, the NHGRI said yesterday.

 

The genome of Apis mellifera, which was assembled by a team led by Richard Gibbs, director of the HumanGenomeSequencingCenterat Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, contains approximately 300 million DNA base pairs - or about one-tenth the size of the human genome.

 

Data from the six-fold sequence coverage have been deposited in GenBank, and will be distributed to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database and the DNA Data Bank of Japan.

 

The honey bee genome project began in early 2003 $6.9 million in funding provided by the NHGRI and $750,000 from the USDepartment of Agriculture contributed.