Here we present an adaptation of NimbleGen 2.1M-probe array sequence capture for whole exome sequencing using the Illumina Genome Analyzer (GA) platform.The protocol involves two-stage library construction.The specificity of exome enrichment was approximately 80% with 95.6% even coverage of the 34 Mb target region at an average sequencing depth of 33-fold.Comparison of our results with whole genome shot-gun resequencing results showed that the exome SNP calls gave only 0.97% false positive and 6.27% false negative variants.Our protocol is also well suited for use with whole genome amplified DNA.The results presented here indicate that there is a promising future for large-scale population genomics and medical studies using a whole exome sequencing approach.
In the canonical version of evolution by gene duplication, one copy is kept unaltered while the other is free to evolve. This process of evolutionary experimentation can persist for millions of years. Since it is so short lived in comparison to the lifetime of the core genes that make up the majority of most genomes, a substantial fraction of the genome and the transcriptome may-in principle-be attributable to what we will refer to as "evolutionary transients", referring here to both the process and the genes that have gone or are undergoing this process. Using the rice gene set as a test case, we argue that this phenomenon goes a long way towards explaining why there are so many more rice genes than Arabidopsis genes, and why most excess rice genes show low similarity to eudicots.
