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Sheep Genomes

What is the difference between the virtual sheep genome and the real sheep genome?

The virtual sheep genome is the sequence of the bovine genome reorganised into the structure of the sheep genome based on syntenic blocks defined using sheep BACs. In the real sheep genome the bovine sequence in the virtual sheep genome is replaced with actual sheep sequence, or n's where no sheep sequence is available.

Why have a virtual sheep genome when we have a real sheep genome sequence?

The real sheep genome sequence assembly covers approximately 43% of the actual total genome sequence and as only information mappable by sequence alignment is displayed many sheep markers, BAC-end sequences etc. are not mappable and are not displayed. In contrast, the virtual sheep genome contains markers, BAC-end sequences etc. mapped using comparative approaches and therefore is much more comprehensive in it's coverage.

For maximum information about a region use the virtual sheep genome and for real sheep sequence use the real sheep genome assembly. As both are based on the same comparative framework the orders of features should be the same and are heavily biased towards synteny with the cattle genome.

Bovine Genome

The sheep BAC-end sequences from the CHORI-243 Library have been positioned on the current bovine genome assembly. The locations of SSRs have also been identified and are shown on the framework of the bovine genome.

Sheep BAC-end Annotation

Each sheep BAC-end sequence has been annotated for repeats, matches to the bovine genome, SSRs, and more. The analysis of the sheep BAC-sequences was supported by Sheep Genomics.

Markers

The sheep marker data used to generate the following items was provided courtesy of the Australian Sheep Gene Mapping Web Site. The original data coordinates were in cM. However, base-pair coordinates have been approximated by multiplying each position by 1,000,000.

SheepGenomics