We continue our exploration of flightless bird genomics with a chromosome-length upgrade to a southern cassowary genome assembly, also based on work from (Sackton et al., Science, 2019).
Southern cassowary is one of the three living species of cassowary, and is related to emus and rheas; see the relevant emu and rhea blog posts!
Thank you Houston Zoo for the sample used to prepare the Hi-C library!
Explore below the whole genome alignment plots for the new assembly. The results confirm our previous observation for extensive conservation of synteny between autosomes, observed all the way to chicken (100MY to common ancestor), but not so much for the sex chromosome (#5 for cassowary, #34 for the chicken genome assembly).
