As a major session of the 9th International Conference on Genomics (ICG9), Fish-T1K (Transcriptomes of 1,000 Fishes) workshop was successfully held on September 12th 2014, in Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center. The workshop was chaired by Ying Sun, the project leader of Fish-T1K,and Associate Professor, and Director of Marine Biobank of China National Genebank. The other two steering committee members, Professor Guillermo Ortí from Department of Biological Sciences of the George Washington University and Professor Byrappa Venkatesh from Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of A*STAR, Singapore attended the meeting and gave excellent presentations. Professor Gane Ka-Shu Wong from University of Alberta who successfully led 1,000 plant transcriptomes (1KP) project, and Professor Keith Crandall Director of the Computational Biology Institute of the George Washington University were the other invited speakers.
Since Fish-T1K's inception in November 2013, 33 scientists from 18 institutions worldwide in ichthyology, fish phylogeny, molecular biology, genomics and computational biology have joined the project. In the last one year, a series of standards such as genome quality collection and sampling pipelines, logistics solutions, bioinformatics analysis pipelines have been established. As on June 2014, 6,000 genome sequencing-quality fish samples have been collected, covering 62% (44/71) orders, 28% (112/398) families of fishes. From among these samples, RNA has been extracted from 162 samples representing 76 species (23 orders) and 46 RNA samples covering 19 species (14 orders) have been sequenced.
Prof. Gane Wong started the workshop with an exciting talk focused on achievements of 1KP (1,000 Plant Transcriptome) project and shared his experiences and insights for successful running of 1Kp project. Then prof. Sun presented Fish-T1K's goals and objectives, recent progress, challenges and future plans. Issues of fish phylogenetic tree construction, whole genome duplication in the fish lineage and tools for genomic data analysis were addressed by Professors Ortí, Venkatesh and Crandall, respectively.
The success of Fish-T1K workshop will accelerate the pace of Fish-T1K project towards collecting a larger number of families and orders of fishes. It will also promote generating high-standard data and resources for fish omic study, as well as developing new methods, techniques that will enable major discoveries. All these will greatly advance the study of fish biology and eventually contribute towards global fish biodiversity conservation efforts and sustainable utilization of natural resources.
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