Bald eagle and other bird genome sequence and annotation data publicly available at NCBI

A series of press releases, including one by Science Publishing, recently announced the first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, who analyzed genome sequences and annotation data for 48 bird genomes representing all of the bird taxonomic orders. All of the sequenced genomes, along with any annotation provided by the submitter, are available in NCBI resources including Assembly, Nucleotide, Protein, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), and BLAST, or from species-specific GenBank genomes FTP directories. RNA-Seq data for some of the bird species can be found in SRA.

With the exception of three very fragmented assemblies, NCBI annotated the genome assemblies submitted by the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium using NCBI’s Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline, and these annotations are now part of the RefSeq project. The RefSeq project also generated annotations for an additional 6 bird assemblies, for a total of 51 RefSeq genomes. A summary of all the bird genomes that have RefSeq annotation is here.

Figure 1. A selection of the bird genomes with RefSeq annotation. At the top right is a legend describing resource links for each bird genome. Detailed annotation reports, accessible through the "AR" link in the far right column, are available for those genomes annotated in 2014. RefSeq annotation is on organism-specific BLAST pages (the "B" link) and on FTP (the "F" link). Click on the picture to go to the summary table.
Figure 1. A selection of the bird genomes with RefSeq annotation. At the top right is a legend describing resource links for each bird genome. Detailed annotation reports, accessible through the “AR” link in the far right column, are available for those genomes annotated in 2014. RefSeq annotation is on organism-specific BLAST pages (the “B” link) and on FTP (the “F” link). Click on the picture to go to the summary table.

RNA-Seq data was used to generate annotations for 12 of the 51 bird assemblies. The number of protein-coding genes per genome ranges from >13,300 to >21,100 (chicken) with an average of 14,932 protein-coding genes. Orthology to human proteins was also calculated using simple metrics of local synteny and sequence similarity, and on average, roughly 11,000 orthologous proteins were identified per avian genome. These results are shown in the Homology section of NCBI Gene records (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2. A portion of the NCBI Gene report for the bald eagle ACO2 gene. The graphical display includes information about the gene structure, the RefSeq transcript and protein models, and RNA-Seq coverage graphs produced by the annotation pipeline. The Homology section is highlighted, showing 139 organisms, including the bald eagle, with orthology to the human ACO2 gene.
Figure 2. A portion of the NCBI Gene report for the bald eagle ACO2 gene. The graphical display includes information about the gene structure, the RefSeq transcript and protein models, and RNA-Seq coverage graphs produced by the annotation pipeline. The Homology section is highlighted, showing 139 organisms, including the bald eagle, with orthology to the human ACO2 gene.

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