A whole-genome assembly of the domestic cow, Bos taurus

The genome of the domestic cow, Bos taurus, was sequenced using a mixture of hierarchical and whole-genome shotgun sequencing methods.

We have assembled the 35 million sequence reads and applied a variety of assembly improvement techniques, creating an assembly of 2.86 billion base pairs that has multiple improvements over previous assemblies: it is more complete, covering more of the genome; thousands of gaps have been closed; many erroneous inversions, deletions, and translocations have been corrected; and thousands of single-nucleotide errors have been corrected. Our evaluation using independent metrics demonstrates that the resulting assembly is substantially more accurate and complete than alternative versions.