Dr. Leena Salmela tells about her recent work on DNA sequencing in the Glanville fritillary butterfly genome project on Thursday 09.10.2014 at 12:15-13:00 in Exactum room C222. The lecture is targeted to the students of the Algorithms for Bioinformatics course but others are welcome to attend.
Abstract
The goal of de novo genome assembly is to reconstuct the genomic sequence of a previously unsequenced organism. Current technology is not able to read the complete genome of an organism from the beginning to the end but instead only short sequences of DNA, called reads, can be read at a time. The complete genome must then be assembled from these short reads computationally. Assembling a genome proceeds in several computational steps. First the sequencing errors in the reads are corrected. The corrected reads are then assembled into larger contiguous fragments called contigs. Contigs are then further organized into scaffolds which may contain gaps between the contigs. As a last step one attempts to fill the gaps between consecutive contigs in the scaffolds. Finally the resulting draft genome is validated. In this talk I will give an overview of the data and computational methods used in the genome project of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia).