Comparative genomics of the tardigrades <i>Hypsibius dujardini</i> and <i>Ramazzottius varieornatus</i>

Tardigrada, a phylum of meiofaunal organisms, have been at the center of discussions of the evolution of Metazoa, the biology of survival in extreme environments, and the role of horizontal gene transfer in animal evolution. Tardigrada are placed as sisters to Arthropoda and Onychophora (velvet worms) in the superphylum Panarthropoda by morphological analyses, but many molecular phylogenies fail to recover this relationship. This tension between molecular and morphological understanding may be very revealing of the mode and patterns of evolution of major groups. Limnoterrestrial tardigrades display extreme cryptobiotic abilities, including anhydrobiosis and cryobiosis, as do bdelloid rotifers, nematodes, and other animals of the water film. These extremophile behaviors challenge understanding of normal, aqueous physiology: how does a multicellular organism avoid lethal cellular collapse in the absence of liquid water? Meiofaunal species have been reported to have elevated levels of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events, but how important this is in evolution, and particularly in the evolution of extremophile physiology, is unclear. To address these questions, we resequenced and reassembled the genome of H. dujardini, a limnoterrestrial tardigrade that can undergo anhydrobiosis only after extensive pre-exposure to drying conditions, and compared it to the genome of R. varieornatus, a related species with tolerance to rapid desiccation. The 2 species had contrasting gene expression responses to anhydrobiosis, with major transcriptional change in H. dujardini but limited regulation in R. varieornatus. We identified few horizontally transferred genes, but some of these were shown to be involved in entry into anhydrobiosis. Whole-genome molecular phylogenies supported a Tardigrada+Nematoda relationship over Tardigrada+Arthropoda, but rare genomic changes tended to support Tardigrada+Arthropoda

SAMSVM: A tool for misalignment filtration of SAM-format sequences with support vector machine

Sequence alignment/map (SAM) formatted sequences [Li H, Handsaker B, Wysoker A et al., Bioinformatics 25(16):2078-2079, 2009.] have taken on a main role in bioinformatics since the development of massive parallel sequencing. However, because misalignment of sequences poses a significant problem in analysis of sequencing data that could lead to false positives in variant calling, the exclusion of misaligned reads is a necessity in analysis. In this regard, the multiple features of SAM-formatted sequences can be treated as vectors in a multi-dimension space to allow the application of a support vector machine (SVM). Applying the LIBSVM tools developed by Chang and Lin [Chang C-C, Lin C-J, ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol 2:1-27, 2011.] as a simple interface for support vector classification, the SAMSVM package has been developed in this study to enable misalignment filtration of SAM-formatted sequences. Cross-validation between two simulated datasets processed with SAMSVM yielded accuracies that ranged from 0.89 to 0.97 with F-scores ranging from 0.77 to 0.94 in 14 groups characterized by different mutation rates from 0.001 to 0.1, indicating that the model built using SAMSVM was accurate in misalignment detection. Application of SAMSVM to actual sequencing data resulted in filtration of misaligned reads and correction of variant calling. © 2015 Imperial College Press

The genome of Schmidtea mediterranea and the evolution of core cellular mechanisms

The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea is an important model for stem cell research and regeneration, but adequate genome resources for this species have been lacking. Here we report a highly contiguous genome assembly of S. mediterranea, using long-read sequencing and a de novo assembler (MARVEL) enhanced for low-complexity reads. The S. mediterranea genome is highly polymorphic and repetitive, and harbours a novel class of giant retroelements. Furthermore, the genome assembly lacks a number of highly conserved genes, including critical components of the mitotic spindle assembly checkpoint, but planarians maintain checkpoint function. Our genome assembly provides a key model system resource that will be useful for studying regeneration and the evolutionary plasticity of core cell biological mechanisms