GRCm39: the new mouse reference genome assembly

The GRC is pleased to announce the release of GRCm39 (GCA_000001635.9), the latest version of the mouse reference genome assembly. GRCm39 is the first coordinate-changing update to the mouse reference since the 2012 release of GRCm38. More than 400 reported issues were resolved in the production of the new assembly, which also incorporates the sequence edits released as scaffolds in the six GRCm38 patch releases.The new reference assembly exhibits substantial improvements in contiguity. As shown in Fig 1, the scaffold N50 has increased by 95% to 106.1 Mb in GRCm39, and 1.9 Mb of non-N bases were added to the assembly. The gap count has been nearly cut in half, with the total gap length reduced by 4.5 Mb. The decrease in gap length reflects in part the use of optical map data to size the remaining gaps wherever possible, replacing many of the default 50 kb gaps found in GRCm38. Sequences used for gap closures included clones, GRC-constructed contigs, as well as contigs from the C57BL/6J long-read based assemblyASM377452v2.Figure 1: GRCm39 Assembly StatisticsAs in prior assembly versions, the GRCm39 chromosome sequences continue to represent the C57BL/6J strain. However, the alternate loci scaffolds that provided additional strain representations for highly variant genomic regions in GRCm38 and MGSCv37, have been removed from the assembly. The relatively low usage of these scaffolds, coupled with a growing number of high quality strain-specific genome assemblies ...
Source: GenomeRef - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Source Type: blogs