Acorn Worm Genome Project
Acorn Worm Genome Project
 Photo by Chris Lowe Links
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About the Project
The BCM-HGSC is sequencing the genome of the acorn worm (Saccoglossus kowalevskii). The acorn worm is a hemichordate on a branch of the evolutionary tree between chordates (vertebrates and sea squirt) and echinoderms (sea urchin). The genome sequence is expected to yield insights about evolution, including the origin of chordates, the origin of deuterostomes and the origin of bilateral animals.
The acorn worm Genome Sequencing Consortium is led by the BCM-HGSC. The goal of the project is to produce a six-fold WGS shotgun draft assembly.
An introductory meeting of the acorn worm genome project was held at the BCM-HGSC in 2005 with John Gerhart, Christopher Lowe, and Marc Kirschner. The research community has constructed the following resources:
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a 13x coverage 130kb BAC library
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three cDNA libraries from different developmental stages
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EST data representing ~20,000 unique genes
The sequencing and comparative analysis is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Access to the Data
Genome Assembly
A draft assembly (Skow_1.0) is available for download on our FTP site.
The Skow_1.0 assembly covers 90-97% (EST-cDNA representation) of the ~800 Mb genome.
BLAST Searches
BLAST searches of the Acorn Worm preliminary assembly are now available from our BLAST site. Contig sequences are available from the links in the BLAST output and from the FTP site.
Traces are available from the NCBI Trace Archive via a query by species or by searching with a query sequence using NCBI MegaBLAST with the same species or cross species query.
Resources
International Genome Consortium Database