Another new paper out in Molecular Ecology Resources!

New paper alert from the Dearing Lab in Molecular Ecology Resources: “Trio-binned genomes of the woodrats Neotoma bryanti and Neotoma lepida reveal novel gene islands and rapid copy number evolution of xenobiotic metabolizing genes”. In this study, we assembled the genomes of two woodrat species and identified several gene family expansions that may be the key to feeding on toxic plants like creosote.

Check out the Greenhalgh et al. publication here.

Trio binning and chromosome scaffolding methodology: (A) Illumina NovaSeq reads were generated for the parents of an F1 cross between Neotoma bryanti and N. lepida, while PacBio SMRT reads were produced for the hybrid. (B) The Illumina reads were examined to identify sequences unique to each parental haplotype. (C) The F1 PacBio reads were sorted by haplotype based on the presence of parent-specific sequences, and assembled separately. (D) The assembled contigs were scaffolded into chromosomes using alignments against the Peromyscus leucopus, P. maniculatus and P. nasutus genomes. Panels A–C are heavily based on Figure 1 from Koren et al., 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4277).