Lost in fog, what to do with a assembly

[c_ro87]

Hello, i'm fairly new to the assembly world... maybe someone of u can give me a lead to where i must point. i'm a student and entry into a big assembly project, but my director not give me guidelines to what to do.

The mayor center in the consortium already finish the assembly, its a vegetal, and now they are going to do gene prediction and transcriptomics phase. I have to do "things" with the final assembly but they dont have to be gene prediction or transcriptomics, i mean i need to see what other work i could do over the final assembly, so what thing i can do???

i would really aprecciate any suggestion.

Sorry for my bad english.

best regards, Cristian

[westerman]

Well, directors are suppose to give direction. But perhaps your adviser wants you to do reading and then come back to ask intelligent questions and create interesting research. It is a wide-open topic.

Assuming that all you have are computational resources (as opposed to being able to do laboratory work), one thing you could do is a cross-species comparison. Compare to the well known plants -- rice, arabidopsis -- and any other species related to your own. What is the same? What is different? And more importantly, why?

Another computational project is to trace out the metabolic pathways. That can also lead to cross-species comparisons. Perhaps one of the species has an interesting pathway or a work-around to a missing enzyme.

It can be fun being a student. The entire world is open for exploration (as versus being bogged down in the minutia of a day-to-day job) but that openness can also be scary.

Good luck in your project.