Dear Ciliate Researchers,

The most recent assembly (Assembly 2) of the Tetrahymena thermophila
macronuclear genome sequence has been deposited in Genbank's Whole
Genome Shotgun (WGS) section by Jonathan Eisen and his team at TIGR.
Congratulations to everyone working on the sequencing project on this
milestone!

TGD has added the “Macronuclear Genome (TIGR assembly 2)” dataset to
its BLAST options (http://seq.ciliate.org/cgi-bin/blast-tgd.pl).   The
fastest way to find the genomic region containing your gene of interest
at TGD is to test our new BLAT (BLAST-Like Alignment Tool) option, a
program designed by Jim Kent as a speedy way to map sequences to the
human genome.  Results from a typical BLAT search are returned by TGD’s
server in about one second.  BLASTN and TBLASTX searches take slightly
longer - about one minute - but return more distantly related results,
great for cross-species comparisons or paralog searches.  Select either
BLAT or BLAST from the program selection menu on our BLAST page.

Cheers,
Nick Stover
Scientific Curator
Tetrahymena Genome Database
www.ciliate.org