Faculty of Science E-newsletter

Professor Chan Ting Fung and Professor Lam Hon Ming of School of Life Sciences performed comprehensive genomic and transcriptomic analyses on Senzu, an American Shorthair in breed, and have constructed a high-resolution chromosome-scale full genome sequence to greatly improve and advance the current cat genome reference.

Reference genome sequence assembly is vital to various research and diagnostic analyses. The first complete genome sequence on an Abyssinian cat was released in 2007 and that on other breeds were partially sequenced in subsequent years. However, the highly-inbred Abyssinian cat is phylogenetically distant from many modern cats, indicating that the genome assemblies have limitations on representing the vast diversity of the cat population.

The CUHK research team cooperated with Japanese research teams in assembling all 19 chromosomes of Senzu to near full-length by combining multiple advanced genomic technologies. The AnAms1.0 genome, built on the most famous household cat breeds which are phylogenetically closer to many modern cats, is now publicly accessible on a cat genome database named Cats genome informatics (Cats-I, https://cat.annotation.jp/). The analysed data not only facilitates the accumulation and sharing of genomic resources, but also offers a more representative alternative to the current reference and aids the development and application of veterinary medicine in the long run, including to improve feline health and enable precision medicine promising in human application.

Further reading:
Isobe, S., Matsumoto, Y., Chung, C., Sakamoto, M., Chan, T., Hirakawa, H., ... & Tanizawa, Y. (2020). AnAms1. 0: A high-quality chromosome-scale assembly of a domestic cat Felis catus of American Shorthair breed. bioRxiv. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.19.103788

University Press Release