bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.18.997395; this version posted March 18, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Assembly and Annotation of an Ashkenazi Human Reference Genome Alaina Shumate1,2,† Aleksey V. Zimin1,2,† Rachel M. Sherman1,3 Daniela Puiu1,3 Justin M. Wagner4 Nathan D. Olson4 Mihaela Pertea1,2 Marc L. Salit5 Justin M. Zook4 Steven L. Salzberg1,2,3,6* 1Center for Computational Biology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 3Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 4National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 5Joint Initiative for Metrology in Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 6Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD †These authors contributed equally to this work. *Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] Abstract Here we describe the assembly and annotation of the genome of an Ashkenazi individual and the creation of a new, population-specific human reference genome. This genome is more contiguous and more complete than GRCh38, the latest version of the human reference genome, and is annotated with highly similar gene content. The Ashkenazi reference genome, Ash1, contains 2,973,118,650 nucleotides as compared to 2,937,639,212 in GRCh38. Annotation identified 20,157 protein-coding genes, of which 19,563 are >99% identical to their counterparts on GRCh38. Most of the remaining genes have small differences.