Isolated and fragmented prairie chicken populations have become a model system for conservation. These include the critically endangered Attwater's prairie chicken, a subspecies of prairie chick that is among the rarest birds in the world, and is the subject of extensive and ongoing conservation efforts.
To facilitate conservation of Attwater’s and other prairie chickens, we are releasing a chromosome-length genome assembly for the greater prairie chicken Tympanuchus cupido. The draft assembly, T_cupido_pinnatus_GPC_3440_v1 (NCBI accession: GCA_001870855.1), was created by Revive & Restore.
To give a sense of how chromosomes evolved across the bird lineage, we are also incorporating the band-tailed pigeon (Patagioenas fasciata) assembly we have shared in Dudchenko et al., bioRxiv, 2018, based on a draft published in Murray et al., Science, 2017, into the DNA Zoo site, here. Whole genome alignments of both assemblies to the chicken genome assembly GRCg6a are shown below.
Note that the data for the draft genome was generated for T. cupido pinnatus subspecies of the prairie chicken, and the sample for the Hi-C upgrade came from T. cupido attwateri.