Adopting the new reference genome assembly for D. melanogaster

Since 2005, the BDGP release 5 assembly has been the melanogaster reference. In January 2014, BDGP finalized the submission of its new release 6 assembly to NCBI (GenBank). FlyBase is working with NCBI, BDGP and other major data producers to migrate all genome annotation data to Release 6. We have begun the migration process and expect it to be completed by the end of the summer of 2014. We will coordinate public migration to Release 6 with NCBI and other major genome archives starting in the summer of 2014. Both FlyBase and NCBI will provide tools to help Drosophila labs migrate their private data to Release 6, and FlyBase will be announcing these plans to the community.

The D. melanogaster annotation Release 5.56, released on March 14, 2014 will be the last major gene model annotation set for Genome Release 5. All D. melanogaster gene models have been manually reviewed in the context of modENCODE high-throughput data, including RNA-Seq exon junctions, RNA-Seq coverage data, and transcription start sites. We are in the process of submitting this release to NCBI, and during the submission process, a few (<20) small changes to gene models have been required. Therefore there will be one final annotation set on Release 5, Release 5.57, which will correspond to the GenBank release. After Release 5.57, the next gene model annotation set will be on the Release 6 assembly.

FlyBase personnel will be availble at the ADRC meeting in San Diego to discuss this final annotation release, the migration to Release 6, and any other questions you may have about FlyBase. Please stop by our demo room!