Recent Work Toward EquCab3: A New Reference Genome Sequence for the Domestic Horse

Work toward a third iteration of a reference genome for the domestic horse began last year with the generation of 40X of Illumina paired end and mate pair sequence data from the inbred Thoroughbred Mare Twilight to complement the existing Sanger sequence data used to create EquCab2.  Here we report a new iteration of the reference based exclusively on Twilight.  We also introduce a web interface designed to engage the equine research community in the assembly effort.  Data that presented through the web interface includes the annotated scaffolds, as well as several high throughput horse datasets mapped to the incremental release, both whole genome shotgun, and RNA-Seq data for inspection by the community.  It is our hope that access to this information will enable the horse community to identify difficult regions within the Twilight assembly for which they may contribute data, and expertise.