Plant and Animal Genome XII, San Diego, CA. Abstract P59.
As a first step towards sequencing the pig genome, approximately 80,000 high quality BAC-end sequences (BESs) have been generated from the RPCI-44 and CHORI-242 BAC libraries. The combined total of sequences is 42.45 Mb or an estimated 1.4% of the genome. BAC-end sequences were masked for repetitive elements (32%) and subsequently analyzed using BLASTn similarity searches against the human genome (build 33). A total of 21,195 BESs had significant (e-5) matches with human draft sequence. Of these, 18,491 were unique having only a single hit within the human genome. Unique BESs were used as comparative anchors between the porcine and human genomes with a corresponding density of 1 anchor per 77 kb of human sequence. These BESs provide a rich source of markers for the construction of a high resolution human-pig comparative gene map (Meyers et al.). Additionally, the BESs have been used to assign 16,066 porcine BAC clones (1X genome coverage) in fingerprinted contigs based on comparative mapping information (Marron et al.). The approach used here supports the construction of high resolution porcine physical map to permit development of a minimum tiling path for complete sequencing of porcine genome. (Supported in part by NRI-CSREES grant AG2001-35205-09965, CSREES grant AG2002-34480-11828 and a cooperative research agreement from the ARS-USDA, AG58-5438-2-313).