title: Use of quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to estimate the size of the house-fly Musca domestica genome.
abstract: House-flies, Musca domestica, are carriers of more than 100 devastating diseases that have severe consequences for human and animal health. A key bottleneck to progress in controlling the devastating human diseases transmitted by house-flies is lack of knowledge of the basic molecular biology of this species. However, before sequencing of the house-fly genome can be seriously considered it is important to know the size of the genome. In this paper, we used quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to calculate genome size of the house-fly in side-by-side experiments with Drosophila melanogaster (known genome size of 180 Mb). Our results indicate the size of the house-fly genome is 295 +/- 10 Mb and that of D. melanogaster is 184 Mb. Thus, the house-fly genome is only about 1.6-fold larger than the genome of D. melanogaster. This indicates that the size of the house-fly genome makes it an excellent candidate for whole genome sequencing and that quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction is an accurate method for the estimation of the size of insect genomes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, Comstock Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 17853-0901, USA.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: J G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Scott
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D049750:Genome, Insect / Q000235:genetics*; D006793:Houseflies / Q000235:genetics*; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction / Q000379:methods*