Repository series · ncbi-prjna1484192

Columba livia gymnocycla (rock pigeon) genome, bColLiv6, sequence data

The rock pigeon (Columba livia) is a member of the bird family Columbidae (doves and pigeons). It's a fairly large pigeon with pale gray overall with two bold black wingbars and iridescent purple and green on neck. This species has wild and feral populations throughout the world. True wild birds nest on cliffs and in caves from western Europe to central Asia. Feral varieties are common in cities and farmland, often in large flocks (from Wikipedia entry). This sample of a female individual is from the gymnocycla subspecies, the West African rock dove (recent evidence supports a species-level taxonomic arrangement to designate the West African rock dove as C. gymnocycla, PMID: 40896089). The sample was procured from the breeding center project "The Dodo Park" owned by Nasser Bin Mohamed Al-Jbr in northern Qatar and coordinated by Simona Secomandi and supported by Ben Novak to generate a high-quality reference genome for Revive & Restore and the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Sequencing was done by the Vertebrate Genome Lab (VGL) at the Rockefeller University, led by Erich D. Jarvis, Giulio Formenti, and Jennifer Balacco, and assembly and manual curation were done by Secomandi.