Aag2

The Aedes aegypti Aag2 cell line genome sequence is a joint effort between the Andino lab at The University of California, San Francisco and Pacific Biosciences; full sequence data are available in the NCBI BioProject PRJNA398563 record. Assembly of 58x shotgun coverage was performed using Pacific Biosciences Falcon assembly software. The assembly presented consists of 3752 contigs, totalling 1.72 Gigabases, with a contig N50 of 1.42 Mb. The genome size of the cell line is significantly larger than the Liverpool assembly, probably due to the acquesition of a mini-chromosome. A full analysis of the Aag2 cell line genome is made in the article The Diversity, Structure, and Function of Heritable Adaptive Immunity Sequences in the Aedes aegypti Genome (Whitfield Z.J, Dolan P.T. et al, Current Biology, 2017).

The Aedes aegypti cell line Aag2 was derived by Peleg in 1975 and adapted in 1991 by Lan and Fallon. It was selected for sequencing based of its susceptible to infection by many arboviruses including: Dengue, Chikungunya, Zika, Sindbis, Rift Valley Fever Virus, amongst others and the ability to perform molecular biology in the cell line. Genome sequencing was performed on genomic DNA purified from cells acquired from Andrea Gamarnik's lab at the Fundación Instituto Leloir . The passage number is unknown, but considering the date of its derivation, it most likely a highly passaged cell line. The Aag2 cell line is also persistently infected with Cell Fusing Agent Virus (an insect specific Flavivirus), and the insect-specific bunyavirus Phasi Charoen-like virus (PCLV) Maringer et al. BMC Genomics 2017 .