It has become customary for me to put any manuscript on the biorxiv way before it gets published. My first manuscript to land on the pre-print server was the killer whale culture manuscript way back in Feb 2016. The date is actually very important as this was when biorxiv really became main stream in biology with the number of monthly submission going from 60 to 200 per month. Subsequently, the bird comparative population genomics manuscript was on biorxiv before getting published.
Now, very recently the genome of the Indian Peacock was sequenced by Dr. Vineet Sharma from IISER Bhopal. The amount of press coverage was considerable. The Hindu, Mongabay and The times of India all had something to say about this genome. Being part of the team, pushing for posting of the peacock genome manuscript on biorxiv seemed the most obvious thing to do. The manuscript has now been accepted by the journal Frontiers in Genetics after two rounds of interactive review. Screenshot of the provisionally accepted abstract is given below.
Interestingly, it seems that the Peacock genome is the first bird genome to come out of India. The International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium published the first bird genome in 2004. Almost one and half decades later, we have managed to claim a bird genome sequence, even if it is based on paired-end sequencing only. Great effort has been made on the data analysis front to make up for the lack of mate-pair, nanopore, pacbio, optical mapping, genetic map, BAC and other fancy forms of data. Yet, one has to remember that this goes to suggest that perhaps we lag behind rest of the world by almost 15 years atleast in this field.
