Advantages of an Improved Rhesus Macaque Genome for Evolutionary Analyses.

The rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) is widely used in molecular evolutionary analyses, particularly to identify genes under adaptive or unique evolution in the human lineage. For such studies, it is necessary to align nucleotide sequences of homologous protein-coding genes among multiple species. The validity of these analyses is dependent on high quality genomic data. However, for most mammalian species (other than humans and mice), only draft genomes are available. There has been concern that some results obtained from evolutionary analyses using draft genomes may not be correct. The rhesus macaque provides a unique opportunity to determine whether an improved genome (MacaM) yields better results than a draft genome (rheMac2) for evolutionary studies. We compared protein-coding genes annotated in the rheMac2 and MacaM genomes with their human orthologs. We found many genes annotated in rheMac2 had apparently spurious sequences not present in genes derived from MacaM. The rheMac2 annotations also appeared to inflate a frequently used evolutionary index, ω (the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rates). Genes with these spurious sequences must be filtered out from evolutionary analyses to obtain correct results. With the MacaM genome, improved sequence information means many more genes can be examined for indications of selection. These results indicate how upgrading genomes from draft status to a higher level of quality can improve interpretation of evolutionary patterns.

Genome Sequence of Streptomyces aureofaciens ATCC Strain 10762.

Streptomyces aureofaciens is a Gram-positive actinomycete that produces the antibiotics tetracycline and chlortetracycline. Here, we report the assembly and initial annotation of the draft genome sequence of S. aureofaciens ATCC strain 10762.

De novo assembly of the common marmoset transcriptome from NextGen mRNA sequences.

BACKGROUND: Nonhuman primates are important for both biomedical studies and understanding human evolution. Although research in these areas has mostly focused on Old World primates, such as the rhesus macaque, the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), a New World primate, offers important advantages in comparison to other primates, such as an accelerated lifespan. To conduct Next Generation expression studies or to study primate evolution, a high quality annotation of the marmoset genome is required. The availability of marmoset transcriptome data from five tissues, including both raw sequences and assembled transcripts, will aid in the annotation of the newly released marmoset assembly. FINDINGS: RNA WAS EXTRACTED FROM FIVE TISSUES: skeletal muscle, bladder and hippocampus from a male common marmoset, and cerebral cortex and cerebellum from a female common marmoset. All five RNA samples were sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. Sequences were deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive. Transcripts were assembled, annotated and deposited in the NCBI Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly database. CONCLUSIONS: We have provided a high quality annotation of 51,163 transcripts with full-length coding sequence. This set represented a total of 10,833 unique genes. In addition to providing empirical support for the existence of these 10,833 genes, we also provide sequence information for 2,422 genes that were not previously identified in the Ensembl annotation of the marmoset genome.