Manis pentadactyla (Chinese pangolin) genome, mManPen7, sequence data
The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) is native to the northern Indian subcontinent, northern parts of Southeast Asia and southern China. It is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2014, as the wild population is estimated to have declined by more than 80% in three pangolin generations, equal to 21 years. It is threatened by poaching for the illegal wildlife trade (from Wikipedia entry). This sample is from a cultured fibroblast cell line generated by William J Murphy in 2007, expanded for this project in 2020, and originally collected from the skin a male at Taipei Zoo, in Taipei, China, and then used to generate a high-quality reference for a COVID-19 project and the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Karyotyping, by Terje Raudsepp at Texas A&amp;M University Molecular Cytogenetics core, revealed little to no polyploidy in the cultured cells. Sequencing and genome assembly were conducted at the Vertebrate Genomes Lab (VGL) at the Rockefeller University, led by Olivier Fedrigo and Erich D. Jarvis, with support by Jarvis from a COVID-19 research project. The genome is freely available to use upon public release in NCBI.