Assembly and Annotation of Reference Genomes

In a new Introduction to Bioinformatics talk, Tyler Alioto, from CNAG-CRG, introduced some DNA sequencing technologies that make possible a wide range of genomic research.

Tyler Alioto holds a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and, since 2010, has led the Assembly and Annotation Team at CNAG-CRG. His team is responsible for assembling and annotating genomes de novo, and completed genomes range from vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and various microbial species. He has also participated in several important human health-related projects.

During Alioto’s postdoc at Roderic Guigó lab, he became the principal developer of the GeneID gene prediction software and was also an active contributor to the ENCODE project.

At the talk with BDBI students, he explained the importance of having the genome sequenced and assembled and talked about two massive projects: the Earth Biogenome Project and the Human Genome Project.

Alioto explained the aim of these two big projects drawing a parallel with Encyclopedia or Wikipedia: “probably you won’t read all the articles, but is it nice to know they are collected in a unique-open-access place”.

He underlined the importance of doing the sequencing process systematically, like in a production line at scale, to achieve the main goals while saving money and time. He also discussed how to find and annotate the regions of the genome that code for proteins, otherwise known as protein-coding genes.