Good evening, our fellow amateur biologists.
The autumn is already in the rearview mirror with a cold snap heading our way, and the Thanksgiving week is already upon us. It’s hard to believe seven months passed since the last update and renewal of the Binomica Labs page. Somehow I felt it was only a month or two since the last big post.
Things are incredibly hectic over here at Binomica labs – the April started a little slower than I’d have liked, but the sheer number of projects and their progress had been almost overwhelming. Tonight is a little special, however.
We first started planning the sequencing of Deinococcus radiophilus way back in the late autumn of 2018 – and started working on the project in earnest by early 2019. It was far more of a trial and tribulation than we might have expected, starting with only rudimentary experience at handling Illumina and traditional sanger sequencing data until then. I’m not going to go into details of the experience here – we’re planning something a little special for the more human side of our first true research experience. Let’s just say starting off on a brand new research project while holding onto a full time and a part time job can be far more harrowing than what most people expect.
Fast forward to tonight – November 21st 2021. NCBI finally published our first fruit of labor, the first complete genome of Deinococcus radiophilus based on a single MinION flowcell (I will say, there is a good quality contig level genome for the organism deposited at the end of 2018, so ours isn’t the first genome for the organism, alas).
GCA_020889625.1 is the genbank accession for the genome, hosted here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/GCA_020889625.1
It’s under BioProjects PRJNA777950, hosted here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA777950
Which is under BioSample SAMN22895843, hosted here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/biosample/?term=SAMN22895843
There’s a bioarxiv preprint coming up based on the genome as well – frankly most of the time between the beginning of the sequencing project and now was spent on the analysis. The goal for Binomica Labs as an organization have always been to push what an amateur biologist can do – simply sequencing a Bacteria wouldn’t do. We really wanted to see how much of the greater nature we could observe through the genome of the Deinococcus radiophilus. And I’m quite confident we were able to make some fascinating observations that’s never been documented before. The preprint will be submitted before the end of this year 2021- and I believe our patreons will receive an advance copy.
This is an absolutely exciting news for us – and our supporters and fellow amateur researchers helped make this happen. Thank you.
Please stay tuned for the end-of-year updates on our projects, and other interesting stories and materials!
Edit: As of January 27th, 2022, our Deinococcus radiophilus genomes is the representative genome for NCBI Genbank!
The reference genome accession number is GCF_020889625.1, available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/GCF_020889625.1
Now there’s a representative microbial genome from two amateur biologists without degrees, working out of a warehouse studio lab. And none of this could have happened without our Patreon supporters. Thank you!