Genome sequence of the canary (Serinus canaria). Serinus canaria

Songbirds play an important role as model species to answer questions of behavioural neurobiology and developmental biology. The Canary (S. canaria) is of special interest to these fields due to its ability to learn complex vocal motor patterns at adult age. Comparative genomics between non-songbirds and songbirds may elucidate the genetic principles of learning. A bottleneck of a comparative strategy is the low number of bird genomes that is currently available in the databases (non-songbirds: chicken, turkey / songbirds: zebra finch). For this reason the MPI for Ornithology and the NGS core facility of the MPI for molecular Genetics have teamed up to generate Canary whole genome shotgun data by Roche/454 pyro-sequencing and Illumina GAIIx/HiSeq technologies with the aim to assemble and annotate a high quality draft genome of S. canaria.