B10K -- Toward decoding all bird genomes
The new avian family tree based on whole genomes of 48 bird species representing all 30 neoavian orders and two galloanserae orders and two palaeognathae orders. The Avian Phylogenomics Consortium formally announces the launch of the Bird 10,000 genomes (B10K) project, an initiative to generate representative draft genome sequences from all extant bird species within the next five years. This will be the first attempt to sequence the genomes of all living species of a vertebrate class. The establishment of this project is built on the success of the previous ordinal level project, which provided the first proof of concept for carrying out large-scale sequencing of multiple representative species across a vertebrate class and a window into the types of discoveries that can be made with such genomes (1). The announcement of the B10K project is published online today in Nature.