From salzberg@umiacs.umd.edu Mon Dec 1 07:26:18 2008 From: "Steven Salzberg" Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:04:29 -0600 Postmaster: submitted from web posting form To: Multiple Recipients of Subject: new, improved assembly of Bos taurus: UMD assembly 2.0 Dear Colleagues, I'm pleased to announce our newest assembly of the cow (Bos taurus) genome. Back in August we released our second assembly of the cow genome, version 1.5. We have been working steadily since then to improve it further, and version 2.0 (Bos_taurus_UMD_2.0) is now available. You can download the entire assembly from our ftp site: ftp://ftp.cbcb.umd.edu/pub/data/Bos_taurus/Bos_taurus_UMD_2.0/ Or you can run BLAST searches against it on our server: http://blast.cbcb.umd.edu/ The 2.0 assembly has 2,622,383,279 bases placed on chromosomes, and another 272,916,876 in unplaced contigs. Compared to our 1.5 assembly, this assembly has 54 Mbp more sequence placed on chromosomes. We also closed over 5000 small gaps using new computational methods, and we oriented numerous contigs that previously had unknown orientations. Some of the improvements since August are due to questions and comments from some of you - so please continue to let us know when you find a problem with the assembly, and we'll try to fix it for a future release. For those of you who've asked about annotation, we will be working in the coming months, with help from others, to annotate this assembly. Sincerely, Steven Salzberg Horvitz Professor of Computer Science Director, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology 3125 Biomolecular Sciences Building University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742