Tal Yahav from the Privman lab is using the "Queens" of the Hive (high memory servers) to assemble the genome of a new ant species that he himself collected, extracted, and sequenced. The species Cataglyphis drusus is a desert ant native to Israel, which will serve as the model organism for a study in our lab looking for the genetic basis of nestmate recognition in ants.
Tal extracted both DNA and RNA from a single male ant. Genomic DNA sequencing yielded 46 GigaBase (46E9 bases) of sequence data, which Tal assembled into a first draft sequence of the genome. This type of analysis requires very large memory, which is why we purchased the Queens - servers with 768 GB RAM.