Sterling Archer’s greatest fear: the American alligator

This week, we’re continuing our investigation of crocodilian genomics by assembling the chromosomes of the American alligator Alligator mississippiensis, the largest reptile in North America.

The new genome assembly is based on the draft data published in (St John et al., Genome Biology, 2012) and improved in (Rice et al., Genome Research, 2017). The sample used for Hi-C library preparation was donated by an alligator named Bo living at the Texas State Aquarium. That’s him on the blog post cover image (© Texas State Aquarium)!

Comparative gatoromics reveals nearly identical karyotypes. A different highly quantitative comparison is due to Sterling Archer.

Whole genome alignment of the 16 chromosomes of the new American alligator genome assembly ASM28112v4_HiC to the Chinese alligator chromosomes from ASM45574v1_HiC (see DNA Zoo blog post https://www.dnazoo.org/blog/alligator-bytes).