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How I stumbled upon a novel genome for a malaria-like parasite of primates

Sometimes in science you come across things that are definitely interesting, and useful, but which you don’t have time to write up properly for one reason or another. I’m going to try to get into the habit of sharing these as blog-posts rather than letting them disappear. Here is one such story.

Update: we published a paper with a fully annotated genome in a big collaboration between the data generators at the University of Oregon and bioinformaticians at the Sanger Institute.


Not long ago I was searching for orthologs of a malaria gene of interest on the NCBI non-redundant database, which allows one to search across the entire (sequenced) tree of life. Here is a recreation of what I saw:

I was surprised to see that nestled among the Plasmodium species was a sequence from a species called Piliocolobus tephrosceles.