Hedgehog assembly and gene annotation

Assembly

This is the first release of the low-coverage 1.86X assembly of the western European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus). The genome sequencing and assembly is provided by the Broad Institute.

The total number of bases in scaffolds is 3.37 Gb and in contigs it is 2.13 Gb.

Gene 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 9036 such gene-scaffolds, with identifiers of the form "GeneScaffold_1".

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

Mammalian Genome Project

Erinaceus europaeus 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.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.