Chinese hamster genome sequenced from sorted chromosomes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In recent years, the number of published genome sequences has increased substantially owing to major developments in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, concomitant reduction of sequencing costs and improvements in assembly strategies. In 2011, your journal published the genome of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO)-K1 cells, the most frequently used mammalian production cell line for biopharmaceutical products 1 . In this issue, the genomes of several related CHO cell lines as well as of the genome of the Chinese hamster are also presented 2 . Although this information provides long-awaited and necessary insights for scientists working with these important production hosts, it also highlights a major drawback of short-read NGS technology, namely, the difficulty of assembling short-read data and scaffolding these sequences into a fully structured genome. This is especially critical for CHO cells, which are known to be genomically unstable, with frequent chromosome rearrangements and loss 3 , 4 . In the following correspondence, we describe how a chromosome sorting approach can facilitate genome assembly from short-read sequences.