Assembly

common marmoset Callithrix jacchus-3.2.1 is a draft assembly of the common marmoset genome. It was sequenced to 6X coverage using a female marmoset (animal id #186/17066) DNA source kindly provided by Dr. Suzette Tardif, of the Southwestern National Primate Research Center (San Antonio, Texas). The DNA source for the CHORI-259 BAC library was male and the full brother of the female used for whole genome shotgun sequencing (#186/17066). The combined sequence reads were assembled using the PCAP software (Genome Res. 13(9):2164-70 2003) and filtered for all known non-marmoset sequence contaminants.

The new Callithrix jacchus-3.2.1 assembly spans 2.75Gb with 2.62Gb ordered and oriented along 24 chromosomes. Chromosomes were not available in Callithrix jacchus-3.2 (released in Ensembl 56 and Ensembl 57), which was composed of scaffolds and contigs only.

The N50 length is defined as the scaffold (or contig) length N for which 50% of the genome lies in scaffolds (or contigs) of the N50 size or longer. The Callithrix jacchus-3.2.1 assembly is made up of a total of 73,756 scaffolds with an N50 scaffold length of over 6.4Mb. Scaffolds placed on chromosomes have been annotated as described below.

The sequence assembly was provided by The Genome Center, Washington University School of Medicineand the Human Genome Center, Baylor College of Medicine.