Baboons are a widely used nonhuman primate model for biomedical, evolutionary and basic genetics research. Despite this importance, the genomic resources for baboons are quite limited. In particular, the current baboon reference genome Panu_3.0 is a highly fragmented, reference-guided (i.e., not fully de novo) assembly, and its poor quality inhibits our ability to conduct downstream genomic analyses. Here we present a truly de novo genome assembly of the olive baboon (Papio anubis) that uses data from several recently developed single-molecule technologies. Our assembly, Panubis1.0, has an N50 contig size of ~1.46 Mb (as opposed to 139 Kb for Panu_3.0), has single scaffolds that span each of the 20 autosomes and the X chromosome, and is freely available for scientific use from NCBI. We present multiple lines of evidence (including Bionano Genomics data, linkage information, and patterns of linkage disequilibrium) suggesting that the Panubis1.0 assembly corrects large assembly errors in Panu_3.0. This in turn has led to an improved baboon annotation, making Panubis1.0 much more useful for future genomic studies.

Statistics for the experimental sequencing. (XLSX 21 kb)

Statistics for the experimental sequencing. (XLSX 21 kb)

An entry from the Cambridge Structural Database, the world’s repository for small molecule crystal structures. The entry contains experimental data from a crystal diffraction study. The deposited dataset for this entry is freely available from the CCDC and typically includes 3D coordinates, cell parameters, space group, experimental conditions and quality measures.