Draft genome of Bugula neritina, a colonial animal packing powerful symbionts and potential medicines

Mikhail Rayko,Grace Lim-Fong,Jose V Lopez,Adelaide C Rhodes,Jason C Kwan,Polina Kuchur,Aleksey Komissarov,Sergey Kliver,Stephen J O’Brien

doi:10.1038/s41597-020-00684-y

Abstract

Many animal phyla have no representatives within the catalog of whole metazoan genome sequences. This dataset fills in one gap in the genome knowledge of animal phyla with a draft genome of Bugula neritina (phylum Bryozoa). Interest in this species spans ecology and biomedical sciences because B. neritina is the natural source of bioactive compounds called bryostatins. Here we present a draft assembly of the B. neritina genome obtained from PacBio and Illumina HiSeq data, as well as genes and proteins predicted de novo and verified using transcriptome data, along with the functional annotation. These sequences will permit a better understanding of host-symbiont interactions at the genomic level, and also contribute additional phylogenomic markers to evaluate Lophophorate or Lophotrochozoa phylogenetic relationships. The effort also fits well with plans to ultimately sequence all orders of the Metazoa.

Highlights

Background & SummaryColloquially referred to as “moss animals”, these nearly microscopic colonial animals with lattice-like connections compose the phylum Bryozoa (Fig. 1)
Illumina raw reads have been deposited to NCBI SRA database as SRP08129238 as part of the earlier project to characterize the genome of the uncultured bryostatin-producing endosymbiont “Candidatus Endobugula sertula”
We evaluated the completeness of the genome assembly using Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) v2.016

Summary

Introduction

Background & SummaryColloquially referred to as “moss animals”, these nearly microscopic colonial animals with lattice-like connections compose the phylum Bryozoa (Fig. 1). Genome sequences could assist phylogenetic analyses, possibly by providing new markers for study[7]. No complete ectoprocta or bryozoan nuclear genomes appear conceptually nor have been completed[8]. To fill in a gap in the sequencing of animal genomes for understanding the tree of life, we sequenced and assembled the first nuclear Bryozoan genome - the draft genome of B. neritina - using PacBio and Illumina HiSeq data.

Results

Conclusion