Assembly

Duck-billed platypus

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) genome of a female nicknamed "Glennie" (collected at the Upper Barnard River on Glen Rock Station, New South Wales) was sequenced to a total of 6x whole genome coverage. The sequencing strategy we utilized, combined whole genome shotgun plasmid, fosmid and BAC end sequences. The combined sequence reads were assembled using the PCAP software (Genome Res. 13(9):2164-70 2003). This draft sequence assembly submitted to Genbank is referred to as Ornithorhynchus_anatinus-5.0. The database now contains the longer range mapping of the sequence onto Ultracontigs and Chromosomes. Although some of the Supercontigs are mapped to chromosomes, these only represent 21% of the platypus DNA, so we have not emphasised a chromosomal view of platypus for the current release.Future improvements to the platypus draft sequence assembly will be dependent on the availability of funding and improvements to existing assembler software. Funding for the sequencing of the platypus genome was provided by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), National Institutes of Health (NIH).