After a long and fruitful collaboration with our friends at the USDA, we have finally published the goat genome in Nature Genetics. “We demonstrate current state of the art for de novo assembly using the domestic goat (Capra hircus) based on long reads for contig formation, short reads for consensus validation, and scaffolding by optical and chromatin interaction mapping. These combined technologies produced what is, to our knowledge, the most continuous de novo mammalian assembly to date, with chromosome-length scaffolds and only 649 gaps.” If you hit the paywall, you can read the preprint for free on bioRxiv, and NHGRI did a nice piece on the backstory. Huge credit to co-first authors Derek Bickhart, Ben Rosen, and Sergey Koren for years of hard work on this project.