Duminda Senevirathna is a marine biologist at the Uva Wellassa University in Sri Lanka, focussed on genomics in fisheries & sea-food industry and marine pollution. He has conducted DNA barcoding researches on varies sea-foods in Sri Lanka for identification, monitoring, and sustainability, and obtained an M.Phil. in 2014 from University of Ruhuna. Duminda is currently a doctoral student in The University of Tokyo, Japan, studying cetacean genomics.

The drafted whole genome of Risso’s dolphin was revealed to identify the uniqueness for future protections. Genomic DNA was extracted from a blood sample, Nextera library was prepared and sequencing was done by Illumina HiseqX (pair-ends of 149.1 Gb, 58.0x). Also, high molecular weight DNA was used for MinION sequencing (16.91 Gb, 6.58x). The final hybrid assembly was done by LRScaf and total length of 2.57 Gb obtained with 5434 bp mean length and scaffold N50 size of 78917 bp and BUSCOs was 78.2% (237) de novo. The MinION Oxford Nanopore technology has improved the genome quality in a convenient way.

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