BackgroundThe silkworm, Bombyx mori, is one of the most economically important insects in many developing countries owing to its large-scale cultivation for silk production. With the development of genomic and biotechnological tools, B. mori has also become an important bioreactor for production of various recombinant proteins of biomedical interest. In 2004, two genome sequencing projects for B. mori were reported independently by Chinese and Japanese teams; however, the datasets were insufficient for building long genomic scaffolds which are essential for unambiguous annotation of the genome. Now, both the datasets have been merged and assembled through a joint collaboration between the two groups.
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