Dolphin assembly and gene annotation


This is the first release of the low-coverage 2.59X assembly of the dolphin (tursiops truncatus). The genome sequencing is provided by the Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine and assembly is provided by the Broad Institute.

The N50 size is the length such that 50% of the assembled genome lies in blocks of the N50 size or longer. The N50 length for supercontigs is 157.58 kb and is 9.72 kb for contigs. The total number of bases in supercontigs is 2.49 Gb and in contigs is 2.30 Gb.

Gene annotation

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 3642 such gene-scaffolds, with identifiers of the form "GeneScaffold_1".

Mammalian Genome Project


More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.



AssemblyturTru1, Jul 2008
Database version78.1
Base Pairs2,298,460,478
Golden Path Length

The golden path is the length of the reference assembly. It consists of the sum of all top-level sequences in the seq_region table, omitting any redundant regions such as haplotypes and PARs (pseudoautosomal regions).

Genebuild byEnsembl
Genebuild methodProjection build
Genebuild startedNov 2008
Genebuild releasedFeb 2009
Genebuild last updated/patchedApr 2013

Gene counts

Coding genes

Genes and/or transcript that contains an open reading frame (ORF).

Small non coding genes

Small non coding genes are usually fewer than 200 bases long. They may be transcribed but are not translated. In Ensembl, genes with the following biotypes are classed as small non coding genes: miRNA, miscRNA, rRNA, scRNA, snlRNA, snoRNA, snRNA, and also the pseudogenic form of these biotypes. The majority of the small non coding genes in Ensembl are annotated automatically by our ncRNA pipeline. Please note that tRNAs are annotated separately using tRNAscan. tRNAs are included as 'simple fetaures', not genes, because they are not annotated using aligned sequence evidence.


A pseudogene shares an evolutionary history with a functional protein-coding gene but it has been mutated through evolution to contain frameshift and/or stop codon(s) that disrupt the open reading frame.

Gene transcriptsNucleotide sequence resulting from the transcription of the genomic DNA to mRNA. One gene can have different transcripts or splice variants resulting from the alternative splicing of different exons in genes.21,326


Genscan gene predictions57,918