@article {Saunders004564, author = {Diane Saunders and Kentaro Yoshida and Christine Sambles and Rachel Glover and Bernardo Clavijo and Manuel Corpas and Daniel Bunting and Suomeng Dong and Ghanasyam Rallapalli and Matthew D. Clark and David Swarbreck and Sarah Ayling and Matthew Bashton and Steve Collin and Tsuyoshi Hosoya and Anne Edwards and Lisa Crossman and Graham Etherington and Joe Win and Liliana Cano and David J. Studholme and J. Allan Downie and Mario Caccamo and Sophien Kamoun and Dan MacLean}, title = {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}, elocation-id = {004564}, year = {2014}, doi = {10.1101/004564}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {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.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/08/04/004564}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/08/04/004564.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }