De novo Assembly of a Dromedary Camel

The domestic dromedary camel is of economic and cultural importance in many countries in north Africa, the Middle East, and in parts of Asia. With a global population estimate of over fifteen million, many in developing nations, camels are often selected for meat and milk production, draught, riding, and racing traits. Camels possess an array of unique physiological adaptations that have enabled their survival in the arid desert environment. Assembled using only Illumina reads, the currently available reference genome contains 32,572 scaffolds with a N50 of 4.2Mb. We plan to produce a more robust set of genomic resources that will facilitate genomic selection and the study of desert adaptation in mammals using a comparative genomic approach. We selected a male dromedary camel from the US to serve as our genome animal. We established a fibroblast cell line from a skin biopsy for future cytogenetics work, as well as to prepare high molecular weight DNA for next generation sequencing. A total of 53x paired end Illumina and 20x PacBio coverage was generated for a hybrid assembly strategy. In addition, we performed a de novo transcriptome assembly from blood and cultured cells to assist with scaffolding and gene annotation. We plan to anchor the assembled scaffolds to chromosomes using the alpaca genetic map wherever possible. Analysis of the assembled genome is currently ongoing.