Jason T Howard

Aaron, I have an 11 yr old son too. Even though we are in the US, I still want him to see a Kakapo one day!

I would like to give a thank you to Christina Stillwell from Miltenyi Biotec for giving us some useful consumables for the project.

Polina, Very good question. For Jane, we will use PacBio sequencing because it produces a higher quality genome. This is important since the other 124 genomes will be assembled using Jane as a reference. You are correct, we will be using an Illumina sequencing strategy that is widely used for human genome sequencing. Regarding the cost of the sequencing of 124 kakapo genomes, it will cost ~1/3 of what it would to sequence 124 human genomes. The reason is because bird genomes are about 1/3 the size of a human genome so you need less sequence data to get the same sequencing coverage relative to humans. Interestingly, despite birds having smaller genomes, they have approximately the same number of genes. The work that 23 and me does is specific for analyzing human genomes. Let us know if you have any other questions. Jason

Rob, Thank you for your comment. I learned something! Jason

Stafford, that is a good point about the KKea. I was involved in that project, but not in acquiring the sample used for genome sequencing. It may be due to it being a zoo animal, but I'm not sure. Great question!

Thanks Chelsea! This is by far my favorite project I'm involved with.

That is correct. We already have several other parrots' genomes to compare the kakapo genome to. This includes the Kea, which is one of the kakapo's closest relatives.

Good comment Nancy. When we finish this project we should be able to discover even more cost effect methods of doing conservation genetics. I recently heard of two other bird species that are using genome sequence data for conservation. They are the Blue Macaw & the Hawaiian Crow.

Me too! I wish I could go, but I'm based in the US.

Tim, Great question! The previous avian genome sequencing projects I was involved in we were able to distribute all the sequence data freely. • http://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2047-217X-3-11 • http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1320.long This project is unique, as David eluded to. The kākāpō is an endangered animal and any research is on the animal is under the protective watch of the Ngāi Tahu. That being said, I will say that there will be plenty of sequence data available for algorithm development. Jason