Initial Assembly of the Anopheles Gambiae Genome

Anopheles gambiae is the primary mosquito vector for human malaria, a disease that causes an estimated 200 million clinical cases and more than one million deaths annually. Coupled with the recently released sequences of human and rodent malaria species, and that of the human host genome, the sequence of Anopheles gambiae will help to deepen our understanding of this disease.

The Anopheles gambiae genome was sequenced using a whole genome shotgun (WGS) approach, and the resulting WGS sequences were assembled into contigs for submission to GenBank under the project accession AAAB00000000. The first version of the assembly consists of 8,987 sets of ordered and oriented contigs with estimated gap sizes, called scaffolds. These scaffolds are identified with accession numbers ranging from AAAB-01 000001 to AAAB01008987. Over 100 scaffolds comprising about 82 percent of the genome have been mapped to a chromosomal location. An additional 60,737 short contigs, typically less than a thousand base pairs each, have not been uniquely placed within the genome.

An NCBI Map Viewer display for the three chromosomes of Anopheles gambiae is available from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/Entrez/map_search?chr=agambiae.inf.

Sequence data can be found at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/genomes/Anopheles_gambiae/. —VP

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