Genome-wide SNP detection in the great tit Parus major using high throughput sequencing

In this study we have generated over 2 billion basepairs of novel sequence information for an ecological model species, the great tit Parus major. After filtering, we used over 16 million short sequence reads for the de novo assembly of a reference sequence consisting of 550,000 contigs, covering 2.5% of the genome of the great tit. This reference sequence was used as the scaffold for mapping of the sequence reads, which allowed for the detection of over 20,000 novel SNPs.