Japanese eel genome sequence

First draft genome sequence of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica 
Original Research Article
Gene, Volume 511, Issue 2, 15 December 2012, Pages 195-201
Christiaan V. Henkel, Ron P. Dirks, Daniëlle L. de Wijze, Yuki Minegishi, Jun Aoyama, Hans J. Jansen, Ben Turner, Bjarne Knudsen, Martin Bundgaard, Kenneth Lyneborg Hvam, Marten Boetzer, Walter Pirovano, Finn-Arne Weltzien, Sylvie Dufour, Katsumi Tsukamoto, Herman P. Spaink, Guido E.E.J.M. van den Thillart

 

The draft assembly is available at  www.eelgenome.org 

(login: zfscreens; password: h0x_genes).

a b s t r a c t

The Japanese eel is a much appreciated research object and very important for Asian aquaculture; however, 

its genomic resources are still limited. We have used a streamlined bioinformatics pipeline for the de novo 

assembly of the genome sequence of the Japanese eel from raw Illumina sequence reads. The total assembled 

genome has a size of 1.15 Gbp, which is divided over 323,776 scaffolds with an N50 of 52,849 bp, a minimum 

scaffold size of 200 bp and a maximum scaffold size of 1.14 Mbp. Direct comparison of a representative set of 

scaffolds revealed that all the Hox genes and their intergenic distances are almost perfectly conserved 

between the European and the Japanese eel. The first draft genome sequence of an organism strongly catalyzes 

research progress in multiple fields. Therefore, the Japanese eel genome sequencewill provide a rich resource of 

data for all scientists working on this important fish species.