A standard Ensembl projection build was carried out whereby genes from the latest human gene set (from release 49) were projected onto the cat assembly.
Owing to the fragmentary nature of this preliminary assembly, it was necessary to arrange some scaffolds into "gene-scaffold" super-structures, in order to present complete genes. There are 5280 such gene-scaffolds, with identifiers of the form "GeneScaffold_1". It should be noted that for this projection genebuild a combination of human and dog genes were used, where dog genes were used to fill gaps where no human gene had been projected onto the cat sequence.
Felis catus is one of 24 mammals that will be sequenced as part of the Mammalian Genome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A group of species were chosen to maximise the branch length of the evolutionary tree while representing the diversity of mammalian species. Low-coverage 2X assemblies will be produced for these mammals and used in alignments for cross-species comparison. The aim is to increase our understanding of functional elements, especially in the human genome.