Month: December 2014

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.

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Designing exon-specific primers for the human genome

A common task facing geneticists is to assay for sequence changes at particular locations in genes. These assays are often looking for changes in the coding exon of genes, and the target sequences are typically amplified using PCR from genomic DNA using a pair of specific primers. In this article, we will show you how to use NCBI Reference Sequences and Primer-BLAST, NCBI’s primer designer and specificity checker, to design a pair of primers that will amplify a single exon (exon 15) of the human breast cancer 1 (BRCA1) gene.

Here are the steps to follow to design primers to amplify exon 15 from human BRCA1:

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