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. 2020 Feb 24;7(1):66.
doi: 10.1038/s41597-020-0400-3.

The sequence and de novo assembly of the wild yak genome

Yanbin Liu  1 , Jiayu Luo  1 , Jiajia Dou  1 , Biyao Yan  1 , Qingmiao Ren  1 , Bolin Tang  1 , Kun Wang  2 , Qiang Qiu  3
Affiliations

The sequence and de novo assembly of the wild yak genome

Yanbin Liu et al. Sci Data. .

Abstract

Vulnerable populations of wild yak (Bos mutus), the wild ancestral species of domestic yak, survive in extremely cold, harsh and oxygen-poor regions of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) and adjacent high-altitude regions. In this study, we sequenced and assembled its genome de novo. In total, six different insert-size libraries were sequenced, and 662 Gb of clean data were generated. The assembled wild yak genome is 2.83 Gb in length, with an N50 contig size of 63.2 kb and a scaffold size of 16.3 Mb. BUSCO assessment indicated that 93.8% of the highly conserved mammal genes were completely present in the genome assembly. Annotation of the wild yak genome assembly identified 1.41 Gb (49.65%) of repetitive sequences and a total of 22,910 protein-coding genes, including 20,660 (90.18%) annotated with functional terms. This first construction of the wild yak genome provides a variable genetic resource that will facilitate further study of the genetic diversity of bovine species and accelerate yak breeding efforts.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
21-mer distribution in the wild yak genome.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Sequences divergence rate of repeats annotated by RepeatMasker in wild yak. The x-axis represents the sequence divergence rate of repeats. The y-axis represents the percentage of repeat sequences in the genome.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Comparison of structural characteristics of the wild yak genes with those of other mammals. (a) mRNA length, (b) CDS length, (c) Exon length, (d) Intron length, (e) Exon number per gene of wild yak, domestic yak, Bos taurus (UMD3.1), Ovis aries (Oar v3.1) and Bison bonasus (version 1.0). The x-axis represents length or number and the y-axis represents the density of genes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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