In order to study genetics and genomics in non-model and agricultural species, researchers rely on a reference genome to design experiments. Many of these research communities rely on reference genomes where genes were discovered and annotated computationally. You can help scientists curate and correct many of the small errors that computers are not good at fixing! Using this website you will learn more about what genomes are and how they are studied and you will identify and correct issues and inconsistencies associated with the Equine reference genome!
Genetics studies how changes in DNA changes can affect a living organism. Similarly, genomics investigates the entirety of an organism’s DNA-sequence – its genome. Since everyone (except twins and clones!) has a different genome, it can be difficult to organize experiments. Researchers studying genetics and genomics collectively rely on a reference genome in order to make comparisons among different individuals. This way, when a scientist finds what they think is a change in the DNA, or a mutation, they can compare it to the reference genome in order to design experiments.
Generating a reference genome costs a lot of money – but it is getting better. The cost to sequence the first human genome was nearly 3 billion1 dollars! Due to rapid advances in technology and an emerging biomedical market, a genome today only takes ~$1000 dollars to sequence2. This is a pretty good deal, considering that the human genome is composed of nearly 3.2 billion base pairs, the unit of information in DNA3. This advance in technology has also enabled reasearchers and scientists who study genetics in other organisms to draft and assemble their own genomes. In 2009, less than a decade after the human genome was completed, the nearly 2.7 billion base pairs of the equine genome were sequenced and made available to the public4.
A genome is massive. If you printed yours out on paper, it would fill a book case. It almost unbelievable that almost every cell in your body contains a full copy of your DNA. As you can imagine, despite our best attempts, while fully sequencing a genome, errors were introduced. Imagine that even if you were 99.999% accurate while assembling a genome and the genome you were assembling was 3 billion base pairs, you’d still end up with approximately 3 million errors introduced in your reference!
There were thousands of people5 working on the human genome project. Today, we have genome projects for hundreds of different non-model and agricultural species. Most of these teams consist of a handful of researchers who are dedicated to knowing more about frogs, alligators, falcons, hedgehogs, gorillas, bats, walruses, beetles, and yes, horses6.
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Luckily, computers have made most the the process in drafting a reference genome a streamlined process. However, there are still some things computers are just not good at recognizing or resolving.
Our lab studies equine genetics and genomics. We are very proud to be included in the list of animals with a high quality sequenced reference genome. But the hard work is not over.
We are building a website that will turn anyone into a gene curator! Our goal is to design a web-based interface that will teach people the basic anatomy of what scientists look for in the genome. From there you’ll be presented with problematic gene models that were the result of small errors introduced by automated computer pipelines. As a result, your efforts will help researchers throughout the globe learn more about our world and the creatures that live in it. Also, your contributions will not go unnoticed! Your help will also earn you a spot in our contributors page!
We hope that our project will help anyone do the following:
To get started, check out our Contributing Guide!