Chinese hamster genome sequenced from sorted chromosomes

Abstract

In recent years, the number of published genome sequences has increased substantially owing to major developments in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, concomitant reduction of sequencing costs and improvements in assembly strategies. In 2011, your journal published the genome of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO)-K1 cells, the most frequently used mammalian production cell line for biopharmaceutical products 1 . In this issue, the genomes of several related CHO cell lines as well as of the genome of the Chinese hamster are also presented 2 . Although this information provides long-awaited and necessary insights for scientists working with these important production hosts, it also highlights a major drawback of short-read NGS technology, namely, the difficulty of assembling short-read data and scaffolding these sequences into a fully structured genome. This is especially critical for CHO cells, which are known to be genomically unstable, with frequent chromosome rearrangements and loss 3 , 4 . In the following correspondence, we describe how a chromosome sorting approach can facilitate genome assembly from short-read sequences.