i5K Coordinating Group – meeting notes

Feb 19, 2020

11:00-12:00 (ET)

Attending: Monica Poelchau, Brad Coates, Kevin Hackett, Chris Childers, Brian Scheffler, Jay Evans, Glenn Hanes, Marian Goldsmith, Duane McKenna, Anna Childers, Meg Allen, Rob Waterhouse, Sue Brown

  • EBP Update (fringy)
    • No updates.
  • Project Database (Mark, Mara, fringy, Monica): ENA-based
    • No updates.
  • Meetings
    • PAG Ag100Pests Talk: Join Session per Lindsey Perkin (Kevin); Add 2nd Talk (Surya)
      • Kevin has talked to Lindsey Perkin; would encourage a talk on a 'full story' from an Ag100Pest project – would still be good to have an overview talk. We'll need to think about how to prep this
      • Brad plans on giving a 'full story' on the corn rootworm next year
      • Anna: all other genomes are probably too early in the process for a full story
      • Other options: Sheina, Scott, Erin (ALB etc.)
    • Entsoc: Brad has been looking into this, and will take the lead
      • Monica gave an overview of previous symposia we organized within the i5k purview
      • Theme is diversity/inclusion
        • Could also include diversity of stakeholders – government, industry etc.
    • ICE (Rob):
      • There's a program, hopefully everyone will participate, and there is still room for posters.
  • Project Updates
    • DToL (Mark, Mara)
      • No updates.
    • Ag100Pests (Anna)
      • Have moved into HiFi assemblies lately, and these have been working well
      • Are ordering some Illumina for polishing of older assemblies
      • Should be able to push out scaffolded assemblies from this first batch in the next month or so
      • Moving to HiFi has also simplified the compute aspect
      • Closing in on 100 nominated species
        • Still interest in doing a long-horn beetle project (either improve existing or generate new)
    • Beetles (Duane)
      • Not a lot to update – reference quality genomes required by EBP aren't doable at the funds available, so they are working with draft level genomes
        • Anna: costs are going down, could discuss further
      • Momentum behind an NSF proposal that will sequence additional beetle reference genomes – 12 exemplar genomes at high quality
      • New Asian long-horned beetle that is high quality
        • Will be released in GenBank soonish
      • Community is in a great position for nominating species – but they need someone with momentum/energy to lead the effort, which is difficult without funding
    • Cornome (Brad, Jay, Dave)
    • Bees (Brian)
      • No updates – problems with input DNA
    • France (Denis)
    • California Ecosystem (fringy)
    • Leps (Marian)
      • Darwin Tree of Life Project (UK) plans to sequence ALL Lepidoptera - including moths as well as butterflies - in Wytham Woods (not the UK I guess), an ecologically important locale in Britain, as part of the Earth Biogenome Project. It has already posted 5 new draft genome assemblies for moths and 1 for a butterfly:https://www.darwintreeoflife.org/an-initial-set-of-raw-genome-assemblies-from-the-darwin-tree-of-life-project/
      • Link to a Jan 28, 2020 webinar where Mark Blaxter reports on progress with the PAC Bio assemblies, etc for the Darwin TOL project. In it he reports 44 new Lepidoptera assemblies. Also a few screen shots of interest to i5K from the video which start around 12 min. Maybe put a link to it on a public i5k site? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaYbqQQgTL0
      • Moths – not sure. Several leps are being sequenced as part of Ag100Pest project, e.g. coddling moth; Indian meal moth
  • I5K Webinar Update (Anna)
    • No updates.
  • New Funding: New Ideas?
    • No updates
  • Other:
    • Anna, Brian and Kevin are working on proposal for a grasshopper genome (8.5 Gbs)

NEXT MEETING: Mar 18, 2020

11:00-12:00 am ET