The sonso is a unique fish of high economic interest, especially in Catalan regions where it is highly valued culinary. Generating an annotated genome at a chromosomal scale will allow understanding the evolutionary relationship with other species, and even more importantly, it will aid future population genomics studies and the real biological impact of conservation actions on the diversity of populations of these highly territorially important fish species.

This project is funded by the Institute of Catalan Studies, through the Catalan Initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project.

THE ROLE OF CNAG

The reference genome will be produced at CNAG as it ensures the quality standards of a reference genome. Our institution has over 10 years of experience generating long-read data and has so far produced more than 50 reference genomes using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing technology in combination with standard Illumina whole-genome sequencing data. Once the assembly is done, short messenger RNA sequences (RNAseq) will be used to annotate the genome, including prediction with alignment of the sequences to the reference genome, gene prediction based on similarity to annotations of related organisms, and ab initio gene prediction, combining the various obtained annotations with the EvidenceModeler program.

COORDINATION

Dr. Jordi Viñas (Universitat de Girona) wlll coordinate the project.