News

QFAB bioinformatician to speak at international genomics conference

 

18/12/2019

QFAB bioinformatician Valentine Murigneux will present her work on a rare species of macadamia tree at the International Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, USA, 11–15 January 2020.

Valentine will present her talk, “Comparison of Long Read Methods for Sequencing and Assembly of a Plant Genome”, in the ‘Sequencing Complex Genomes’ session of the conference on Sunday, 12 January.
 
“We report a comparison of three long read sequencing methods applied to the de novo sequencing of a plant, Macadamia jansenii. This is a rare species that is a close relative of the macadamia nut recently domesticated in Hawaii and Australia,” said Valentine.
 
“The species was discovered as a single population of about 30 plants in the wild in eastern Australia. Knowledge of the genome of this species will support efforts to conserve the endangered species in the wild.
 
“We have generated sequencing data using Sequel (Pacific Biosciences), PromethION (Oxford Nanopore Technologies) and stLFR (single-tube long fragment read, BGI) technologies for the same DNA sample and evaluated the quality of the assemblies that can be generated directly from these data sets.
 
“The work provides a critical comparison of the cost-effectiveness of established and novel technologies to generate high-quality de-novo reference genome assemblies.”
 
The project involves the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) and the Beijing Genome Institute (BGI), and is supported by the University of Queensland Genome Innovation Hub. 

The project is part of Valentine’s role within the UQ Genome Innovation Hub.

Valentine Murigneux.