DOE JGI releases soybean genome assembly to enable worldwide bioenergy resear...( WALNUT CREEK CA--A preliminary assem...)

WALNUT CREEK, CA--A preliminary assembly and annotation of the soybean genome, Glycine max, has been made available by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), to the greater scientific community to enable bioenergy research.

The announcement was made by Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI Director, during his keynote remarks Jan. 15 at the Plant and Animal Genome XVI Conference in San Diego,CA. The preliminary data can be accessed at http://www.phytozome.net/soybean.

The soybean genome project was initiated through the DOE JGI Community Sequencing Program (CSP) by a consortium led by DOE JGI's Dan Rokhsar, Stanford's Jeremy Schmutz, Gary Stacey of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Randy Shoemaker of Iowa State University, and Scott Jackson of Purdue University, with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

The large-scale shotgun DNA sequencing project began in the middle of 2006 and will be completed in 2008. A total of about 13 million shotgun reads have been produced and deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Trace Archive in accordance with the consortium's commitment to early access and consistent with the Fort Lauderdale genome data release policy.

The current assembly (representing 7.23x coverage), gene, set, and browser are collectively referred to as "Glyma0". Glyma0 is a preliminary release, based on a partial dataset. This is expected to be replaced with an improved, chromosome-scale "Glyma1" version by the end of 2008. Early users of this data are encouraged to track their favorite genes by saving local copies of the DNA sequences of these loci, and not by identifier or sequence coordinate, as these will change in future versions.

DOE JGI's interest in sequencing the soybean stems from its role as a principal source of biodiesel, a renewable, alternative fuel with the high
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