A Locally Funded Puerto Rican Parrot (Amazona vittata) Genome Sequencing Project. Amazona vittata

The genome of the Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata) is being sequenced and assembled in an international collaboration supported by many individual donations from the people of Puerto Rico. A. vittata is a critically endangered Puerto Rican endemic bird, the only surviving native parrot species in the territory of the United States, and the first parrot belonging to the large Neotropical genus Amazona to be studied on a genomic scale. DNA from one A. vittata female was sequenced on HiSeq Illumina platform resulting in a total of almost 42.5 billion nucleotide bases equivalent to 26.89X average coverage depth. After filtering, the assembly resulted in 259,423 contigs (N50=6,983 bp, longest = 75,003 bp) further scaffolded in 148,255 fragments (N50 = 19,470, longest = 206,462 bp) that potentially cover up to 76% of the genome based on the estimated size of 1.58 Gb.