RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Crowdsourced analysis of ash and ash dieback through the Open Ash Dieback project: A year 1 report on datasets and analyses contributed by a self-organising community
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 004564
DO 10.1101/004564
A1 Diane Saunders
A1 Kentaro Yoshida
A1 Christine Sambles
A1 Rachel Glover
A1 Bernardo Clavijo
A1 Manuel Corpas
A1 Daniel Bunting
A1 Suomeng Dong
A1 Ghanasyam Rallapalli
A1 Matthew D. Clark
A1 David Swarbreck
A1 Sarah Ayling
A1 Matthew Bashton
A1 Steve Collin
A1 Tsuyoshi Hosoya
A1 Anne Edwards
A1 Lisa Crossman
A1 Graham Etherington
A1 Joe Win
A1 Liliana Cano
A1 David J. Studholme
A1 J. Allan Downie
A1 Mario Caccamo
A1 Sophien Kamoun
A1 Dan MacLean
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/04/25/004564.abstract
AB Ash dieback is a fungal disease of ash trees caused by Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus that has swept across Europe in the last two decades and is a significant threat to the ash population. This emergent pathogen has been relatively poorly studied and little is known about its genetic make-up. In response to the arrival of this dangerous pathogen in the UK we took the unusual step of providing an open access database and initial sequence datasets to the scientific community for analysis prior to performing an analysis of our own. Our goal was to crowdsource genomic and other analyses and create a community analysing this pathogen. In this report on the evolution of the community and data and analysis obtained in the first year of this activity, we describe the nature and the volume of the contributions and reveal some preliminary insights into the genome and biology of H. pseudoalbidus that emerged. In particular our nascent community generated a first-pass genome assembly containing abundant collapsed AT-rich repeats indicating a typically complex genome structure. Our open science and crowdsourcing effort has brought a wealth of new knowledge about this emergent pathogen within a short time-frame. Our community endeavour highlights the positive impact that open, collaborative approaches can have on fast, responsive modern science.