Decoding the Easter Bunny – an eastern Finnish brown hare to represent the standard for the species’ genome
The Hare Research Group at the Department of Environmental and Biological Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, has published a chromosomally assembled reference genome for the European brown hare. Reference genomes represent a type of a standard for the species genomes, to which any genomic data from the species can be compared.
Traditionally, assembling reference genomes has been very difficult, as they have required constructing cytogenetic and linkage maps of chromosomes, which is why they have been available only for humans and for some well-known model organisms in used in