Sammendrag
Genomics reveal differences and similarities between morphologically identical but geographically disparate isolates of an Arctic and Antarctic diatom species
Sebastian Petters, Hannah Schweitzer, Hans Christopher Bernstein
The Arctic is one of the Earth’s most unique habitats, harboring large fractions of planet’s organic carbon and material as well as its zoo- and phytoplankton. Marine algae, particularly diatoms, are a large group of unicellular organisms with a major impact on Arctic and global ecosystems. The comprise a large fraction of the Earth’s biomass, making up for almost half of the organic material on the marine habitats of the planet. Their conglomerate cells can produce up to half of the planet’s oxygen. However, their genomes with their unique potentials for intraguild interactions remain largely under explored. Using a genomics approach, we are assembling and comparing the genomes of two polar diatom strains of the same species, Porosira glacialis of the family Thalassiosiraceae. One of the strains was isolated from the Antarctic and the other one was isolated from sediment from the Barents Sea of the Arctic Ocean. Genome sequencing was performed via PacBio and assembled according to established pipelines with two different tools, CANU and Flye, before being polished with Racon. A chromosome level assembly was performed with RefAligner and ALLHiC. Additionally, their transcriptomes were aligned with bowtie2 and assembled with Trinity, before being annotated. Their genomes and transcriptomes were analyzed and compared to uncover the shared and unique genome encoded functions between these two morphologically identical but geographically disparate strains.
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