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Use of quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction to estimate the size of the house‐fly Musca domestica genome
Author(s) -
Gao J.,
Scott J. G.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
insect molecular biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.955
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1365-2583
pISSN - 0962-1075
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2583.2006.00690.x
Subject(s) - musca , biology , real time polymerase chain reaction , genome , polymerase chain reaction , genome size , computational biology , genetics , gene , botany , larva
House‐flies, Musca domestica , are carriers of more than 100 devastating diseases that have severe consequences for human and animal health. A key bottleneck to progress in controlling the devastating human diseases transmitted by house‐flies is lack of knowledge of the basic molecular biology of this species. However, before sequencing of the house‐fly genome can be seriously considered it is important to know the size of the genome. In this paper, we used quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction to calculate genome size of the house‐fly in side‐by‐side experiments with Drosophila melanogaster (known genome size of 180 Mb). Our results indicate the size of the house‐fly genome is 295 ± 10 Mb and that of D. melanogaster is 184 Mb. Thus, the house‐fly genome is only about 1.6‐fold larger than the genome of D. melanogaster . This indicates that the size of the house‐fly genome makes it an excellent candidate for whole genome sequencing and that quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction is an accurate method for the estimation of the size of insect genomes.