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Phytophthora sojae contaminating sequences absent from GenBank

Posted by skamoun on 20 Feb 2011 at 11:41 GMT

I became intrigued in this paper because it was pointed out to me that Phytophthora sojae is listed in Figure 1C and this is a genome we have been interested in. A quick blastn search of the JGI P. sojae portal identified some problem sequences. For example, there is a problem with the last ~1.3 kb of scaffold_632. This part of scaffold_632 matches 100% a human sequence. However, this sequence is not present in the GenBank accession of this genome (Phytophthora sojae strain P6497, whole genome shotgun sequence, AAQY00000000) and was presumably filtered out.

Conclusion: As indicated in the other comments, the problem has been overstated. In the case of the P. sojae genome, it seems that NCBI contamination screening pipeline has worked.

No competing interests declared.