Going ape for T2T

November 27, 2023

Last year we released complete, gapless, “T2T” sex chromosomes for chimp, bonobo, gorilla, Sumatran orangutan, Bornean orangutan, and siamang gibbon. This December we are proud to announce our latest preprint “The Complete Sequence and Comparative Analysis of Ape Sex Chromosomes”! Over the past year, we have also finished the autosomes for these genomes! The v2.0 assemblies for these species are now available from our T2T-primates project page, and all of the raw HiFi, ONT, Hi-C, and Illumina sequencing data can be found on GenomeArk. This has been a Herculean effort involving nearly everyone in the lab and a large swath of the T2T team. It turns out that finishing six genomes is a lot more work than finishing one! A huge thank you to everyone involved, especially Kateryna Makova for spearheading the project.