Assembly

This is the first release of the low-coverage 1.7X assembly of the microbat or little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus). The genome sequencing and assembly is 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 49.59 kb and is 3.11kb for contigs. The total number of bases in supercontigs is 2.74 Gb and in contigs is 1.67 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 6328 such gene-scaffolds, with identifiers of the form "GeneScaffold_1".

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

Mammalian Genome Project

Myotis lucifugus is one of 24 mammals that will be sequenced as part of the Mammalian Genome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A group of 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.