Recently, UA researchers won a $1.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to lead an international consortium that is developing a genome variation database for cassava that aims to provide breeding tools to farmers for improving the plant and its disease resistance.The genome of the cassava, or Manihot esculenta, was sequenced in two stages: In a pilot project under JGI’s Community Sequencing Program that was proposed in 2006, JGI researchers generated just under 1-fold coverage of the genome from more than 700,000 Sanger shotgun reads, using plasmid and fosmid libraries, according to Phytozome, a joint resource by JGI and the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of California, Berkeley.
More at InSequence.