The NCBI Map Viewer presents a graphical view of release 5.10 of the annotated Drosophila melanogaster genome; release 5.10 incorporates all available heterochromatic sequences into the assembly and includes an annotation update. Heterochromatic sequences are assembled into six unplaced contigs linked to specific chromosome arms and one unordered superscaffold that contains all unplaced contigs. Note that the individual components of the chrUn superscaffold are unordered and unoriented, so the scaffolds should not be used to determine gene order and orientation across multiple component contigs. Genome annotation is provided by FlyBase and is linked to the FlyBase web site via unique "FBgn" identifiers. Specific FBgn identifiers can be found using the query format "flybase_fbgn#######[id]".

The sequenced Drosophila melanogaster genome was originally determined in a collaboration between Celera and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, and is described in the March 24, 2000 issue of Science. Additional sequencing ("finishing") and re-assembly was carried out by the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (Celniker et al., 2002), and annotation updates are provided by the FlyBase Consortium (Misra et al.,2002).

From early observations of the banding patterns of its polytene chromosomes to current work on mRNA and protein gradients in the developing embryo, Drosophila melanogaster has been studied in biology labs for over eighty years. Many of the genes that define the spatial pattern of cell types and body parts have now been identified, along with the regulatory pathways in which they operate. As the majority of these genes have counterparts in higher eukaryotes, the study of the Drosophila developmental program provides insight into human development as well.

Available Documentation:

• NCBI Handbook: Map Viewer chapter - resource description
• NCBI Handbook: Map Viewer Exercises - tutorials and examples
• Map Viewer Help - details about navigation and customizing your display
• Genome Assembly - description of genome assembly and annotation process
• Gnomon - description of NCBI's Hidden Markov Model (HMM) ab initio prediction program

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