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ViewAttendees 11

Member Symposium

Diversity of Genomic Applications across Entomological Disciplines

1: USDA-ARS’s Ag100Pest Initiative: Sequencing them all, whether big or small

On-Demand
On-Demand
The mission of the USDA-ARS’s Ag100Pest Initiative is to generate reference-quality genome assemblies and annotations for the top 100 agriculturally relevant arthropods within a five-year period. This effort will establish proven extraction, sequencing and assembly methods, along with critical genomic infrastructure necessary for molecular research aimed at understanding the biology, physiology, and evolution of these species. Arthropods of all stripes and sizes including pests of US field crops, livestock, bees, trees, and stored products, as well as foreign invasive threats to US agriculture have faced our sequencers. With data in hand for over half of these 100 species, the inherent “pest-iness” of working with species that vary greatly in size, body composition and genome architecture will be discussed. Major progress has been made toward the generation of highly contiguous and complete contig assemblies from a single individual, even those too small to be visible in the tube, due to advances in low and ultra-low technologies and decreased error-rates of long-read data. With scaffolding, the chromosome-scale assemblies being generated meet and often exceed stringent assembly standards set by within the Earth BioGenome Project. The reference quality assemblies generated by the Ag100Pest Initiative will ensure that arthropod genomics researchers will be anchored to solid references as they endeavor to solve a myriad of challenges facing agriculture.