Genome empowerment for the Puerto Rican parrot – Amazona vittata

Perhaps one of the more gratifying aspects of the post-genomics era is marveling at the creativity of individual projects that push the envelope further and further over the edge. Witness the emergence of human “copy number variation” and discerning that their segmental aneuploidy might affect gene dosage and explain a few hereditary diseases (it does). Or 23andMe, the upstart SNP genotyping-for-the-people venture that began by predicting Oprah Winfrey’s curious ancestry and now is immersed in personal medical genomics disclosure for an affordable price. Or this month’s ENCODE bombshell that features some 4-million new gene regulatory sequence stretches amidst the sea of noncoding genomic DNA (98% of human DNA formerly dubbed “junk DNA”; well hardly!) [1].An article published alongside this paper in GigaScience this month unfolds yet another novel genomics-stimulated innovation — a unique grassroots endeavor to sequence the genome of a critically endangered species from a remote locale where the species survives and is empowered by the local citizenry who wanted to help [2]. The Puerto Rican parrot’s genome has been sequenced and assembled; annotation has commenced and the fresh new data (29-fold Illumina coverage) sits in an open access GigaScience database, GigaDB [3] and a genome browser for any party to query and improve. The work was led by Taras Oleksyk, Juan Carlo Martiez-Cruzado, along with a coterie of conservation minded scientists, and their students at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez – not really a hotbed of genome sequencing centers.The Puerto Rican parrot is a uniquely American parrot, but one of eight parrot species found in the Caribbean (30 species comprise the 4 million years (MY) old-genus radiation in the Amazon region), a graphic example of speciation via island biogeography (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The species was listed as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1967 and as critically endangered by the International Union for