The domestic donkey is derived from the African Wild Ass. As with most domesticated species there are a wide variety of coat colours and sizes. They can live for upto 40years.
We sequenced the genome to a depth of approximately 19.4 X with short reads from a series of libraries with various insert sizes ( 800bp and 2kb) on a HiSeq 2000 sequencer.
The assembled scaffolds of high quality sequences total 48.6 Gb.