Assembly

This is the first release of the low-coverage 2X assembly of the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus). The genome sequencing and assembly are provided by the Broad Institute.

The N50 size is the length such that 50% of the assembled genome lies in blocks of the N50 size or longer. The N50 length for supercontigs is 46 kb and is 2.7 kb for contigs. The total number of bases in supercontigs is 3.85 Gb and in contigs is 2.15 Gb.

Annotation

Owing to the fragmentary nature of this preliminary assembly, it was necessary to arrange some scaffolds into "gene-scaffold" super-structures, in order to present complete genes. There are 8116 such gene-scaffolds, with identifiers of the form "GeneScaffold_1".

• Details of the gene-scaffold construction and subsequent gene-build

Mammalian Genome Project

Dasypus novemcinctus is one of 24 mammals that will be sequenced as part of the Mammalian Genome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The species were chosen to maximise the branch length of the evolutionary tree while representing the diversity of mammalian species.

Low-coverage 2X assemblies will be produced for these mammals and used in alignments for cross-species comparison. The aim is to increase our understanding of functional elements, especially in the human genome. Dasypus novemcinctus is of particular interest to developmental biologists owing to its habit of producing litters of four genetically-identical young, and it is also the animal model for leprosy.