A new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights findings about novel antigen processing and presentation genes in zebrafish. This newly identified genetic diversity, discovered by de novo assembly, represents the most extensive diversity yet seen in the antigen processing genes of any species and fills in previously unrecognized knowledge gaps about the evolution of vertebrate adaptive immunity.
This research was enabled in part by our Bioinformatics Core. CRI Director of Bioinformatics Jorge Andrade, PhD, and Bioinformatician Kyle Hernandez, PhD, are co-authors on the paper. They produced the de novo assembly of the genome of a clonal line of zebrafish, using the CRI’s computing infrastructure for this complex data- and memory-intensive task. They then used many tools to determine which de novo scaffolds aligned near the chromosomal region being studied and aggregated these scaffolds to orient and order them across the region.
Read the full paper here, and see more publications enabled by the CRI here.
