The Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) just had its large coming out party with the release of 15 genomes representing 14 species. Its goal is to sequence every extant vertebrate species – all 66,000 of them. And after years of studying all possible sequencing and scaffolding methods to build de novo reference genomes, they announced that Bionano is an essential part of their workflow.

If you’re an avid Bionano U reader, you already know that Bionano’s chromosome arm length maps are the ideal scaffolding tools, bringing order and orientation to thousands of sequence contigs and correcting chimeric contigs. In fact, all other technologies try to correct errors inherent to sequencing by adding more sequencing. Bionano’s optical mapping, on the other hand, creates de novo maps representing the true structure of the genome, and our pipeline automatically builds a more complete and accurate assembly out of the sequence contigs you import.

The VGP is also quite fond of Bionano’s sample prep methods. Bionano’s DNA isolation kits produce DNA of the highest quality, and the DNA isolated with Bionano Prep Kits is used by the project for their sequencing work as well.

The VGP’s newly sequenced genomes are publicly available in the Genome Ark database. The announcement received plenty of press attention, so head over to their news site if you would like to read up more on their work.