70 years of research on the American mink (Neovison vison schreb., 1777) genetics - where are we now?

Abstract

The purpose of this review is to present the current state of knowledge about the genetics of the American mink (Neovison vison Schreb., 1777) - a species that achieved in the twentieth century an unprecedented ecological success associated with the dynamic development of its economic use. However, despite the large popularity and economic importance of the American mink as a fur animal, and the scale of the problems associated with its introduction beyond the range of natural occurrence, genetic research, particularly molecular genetics and genomics of this species, show relatively little progress. The article contains a comprehensive description of the studies undertaken on the genetics of the species, both in terms of cytogenetics, molecular genetics, genomics, population genetics and phylogenetics. The progress of the genome sequencing project of the American mink is also described as well as its transcriptome annotation. The article also deals with still unexplained and not completed, despite 70 years of genetic research, issues such as the standard karyotype, the precise molecular basis of coat color inheritance and systematic position of the species.

The first draft reference genome of the American mink (Neovison vison)

“…The fourth assembly, draft-assembly, was constructed by an additional round of scaffolding with SSPACE 27 using the HA (lowest number of scaffolds) as the backbone and simulated long insert MP reads from BMA (longer scaffold N50) using ART 28 . Finally this resulted in a 2.45 Gb assembly including gaps (Table 1 ), which corresponds to 90% of the estimated 2.7 Gb mink genome size 29 . The draft genome consisted of 7,175 scaffolds with an N50 of 6.3 Mb, where the largest scaffold was 40.3 Mb.…”

“…American mink (Neovison vison) has an estimated genome size of 2.7 Gb 29 and among the assemblies of large genome species, we achieved a competitive number of N50. We assembled 7,175 scaffolds with an N50 of 6.3 Mb.…”