Advances of the Cattle Tick Genome Sequencing Project

The Rhipicephalus microplus genome is large and complex in structure, making it difficult to assemble a genome sequence and costly to resource the required bioinformatics. In light of this, a consortium of international collaborators was formed to pool resources to begin sequencing this genome. Previously, we reported the assembly of ~145Mbp of the cattle tick genome, derived from gene-rich regions. Here we now report the RMI V2.0 assembly that represents 1.6 Gbp of the gene-rich region of the cattle tick genome. We have also expanded the amount of cattle tick transcripts to 145,822 derived from various tissues and life stages. These transcripts were clustered into 99,363 clusters of at least 95% sequence identity. Functional annotation was assigned to transcripts and these were mapped onto the expanded cattle tick genome. We report the finding of novel genes in the cattle tick genome including microRNAs. A web-based resource was developed to enable the scientific community to access our datasets and conduct analysis through a web-based bioinformatics environment called YABI. The collective bioinformatics resource is termed CattleTickBase. The YABI tool will facilitate access and manipulation of cattle tick genome sequence data as the genome sequencing of R. microplus proceeds. A short update will be provided on the use and challenges of Pacbio technology to expand further this complex genome.