Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) Project

— A coordinated international action to accelerate Genome to Phenome

Current Organizers:

• Brenda Murdoch (University of Idaho, USA), bmurdoch@uidaho.edu
• Ole Madsen (Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands), ole.madsen@wur.nl
• Eveline Ibeagha-Awemu (AAFC, Canada), eveline.ibeagha-awemu@AGR.GC.CA
• Mazdak Salavati (The Roslin Institute, UK), msalavat@ed.ac.uk

Populations of farmed animals are diverse, including many different breeds and populations within each species. Recently, due to advances in sequencing technologies, there has been an explosion in the number of reference quality assembled genomes being produced for farmed animal species. This rise is expected to continue and accelerate over the coming years. Analysing, visualising and annotating these genomes will greatly improve our fundamental understanding of the genetic variation and genomic complexity of breeds and populations of farmed animals. This will contribute to the conservation of genetic diversity but has its own set of challenges. As a community, FAANG needs to keep pace with the amount of data that is becoming available in a unified way. To facilitate this, we have set up a specific FAANG task force under the umbrella of comparative genomics and assembly focused on visualization and analysis of multiple genomes.

The aims of the FAANG task force for comparative genomics and assembly: visualization and analysis of multiple genomes are as follows:

• To gather a global picture of pangenome projects and new genome assembly and annotation information being generated for farmed animal species.
• To provide an overview of which methodologies are being used for genome assembly, annotation, visualization and comparative analysis.
• To help facilitate sharing of data and results for genome assembly, annotation, pangenome and comparative analyses.
• To bring together the farmed animal genomics community working on comparative genomics, pangenomes and genome annotation and foster collaboration.
• To encourage sharing of expertise with others performing comparative genome analysis including the human, bacteria, plant and model organism communities.

Achieving these aims will help foster collaboration and minimise redundancy and duplicated effort within the global farmed animal genomics community. The task force will provide training and the opportunity for networking both within and outside FAANG.

We therefore invite people interested in contributing to this task force to register for the first task force meeting by mailing to faang-dcc@ebi.ac.uk (Or by registering at https://tinyurl.com/26ttyqx3 ).

Please feel free to get in touch with the task force co-organisers for any further queries.