November 1st Webinar

The Ruminant T2T Consortium

The first draft of the human genome assembly was released over twenty years ago. However, a gapless telomere-to-telomere (T2T) “complete” assembly remained elusive until last year. The highly repetitive nature of pericentromeric, subtelomeric, and duplicated gene families, such as rRNA arrays, made them impossible to assemble. It was only with advances in long-read sequencing technologies and new bioinformatic tools that these structures were resolved. Recently, we proposed the application of these new resources, tools, and knowledge in support of a “Ruminant T2T Consortium.” Our goal is to generate complete genomes for the ruminant evolutionary lineage. The ruminant Suborder comprises six Families and 66 living genera. These species are found in geographically dispersed areas and have adapted to a wide variety of environments. They have also been subjected to both natural and artificial selection. Our hypothesis is that T2T assemblies of ruminant species with relatedness varying from those capable of interbreeding to higher evolutionary distances (up to the estimated 25 million years ago last common ancestor) will inform our understanding of the underpinnings of ruminant evolution. It will also shed light on the genomic consequences of domestication and enhance our knowledge of the functional roles of heterochromatin and other repeat regions of the genome.
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