2026/01/05 by Elena Ruggeri, Julien Prunier, Marc-André Sirard +2 · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Immunology and Microbiology · #Genetic Mapping and Diversity in Plants and Animals #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Microbial infections and disease research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0340594
openalex created_date 2026/01/05 · openalex publication_date 2026/01/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) genome and annotation were previously published, but the annotation contained few genes, with many annotation misalignments, and nomenclature not matching HGNC/VGNC naming conventions, making transcriptional studies very difficult. We used in vivo collected granulosa cells for RNA sequencing and de novo transcript assembly through StringTie to identify all nucleotide gene sequences in our samples. Through extensive manual curation we were able to generate a greatly improved genome annotation, increasing gene numbers by 81%. This will greatly enable researchers in this field to utilize the genome and annotation to complete transcriptional studies with this species.