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Maintaining Continuity in a Genome Project
Evolution, not revolution
The new version of the assembled reads will no doubt have fewer contigs, as more pieces of the puzzle are put together. As a result, the same gene will almost certainly be referred to differently in one version than in the next.
While the progress towards a completed sequence is certainly welcome, it brings with it a potentially disastrous side-effect. People may have expended a good deal of effort in using the older version, tying their findings to the older coordinates. For example, someone may have analyzed incomplete genome to find all single-nucleotide variants amongst isolates of S. sanguis. That list now consists of coordinates that are obsolete.
What can be done to avoid the necessity of repeating all work on the old version?
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