Salpa genome and developmental transcriptome analyses reveal molecular flexibility enabling reproductive success in a rapidly changing environment ...

• Main Authors: Kate R Castellano, Paola Batta-Lona, Ann Bucklin, Rachel J O'Neill
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7435265; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.7435265

Ocean warming favors pelagic tunicates, such as salps, that exhibit increasingly frequent and rapid population blooms, impacting trophic dynamics and composition and human marine-dependent activities. Salp blooms are a result of their successful reproductive life history, alternating seasonally between asexual and sexual protogynous (i.e. sequential) hermaphroditic stages. While predicting future salp bloom frequency and intensity relies on an understanding of the transitions during the sexual stage from female through parturition and subsequent sex change to male, these transitions have not been explored at the molecular level. Here we report the development of the first complete genome of S. thompsoni and the North Atlantic sister species S. aspera. Genome and comparative analyses reveal an abundance of repeats and G-quadruplex (G4) motifs, a highly stable secondary structure, distributed throughout both salp genomes, a feature shared with other tunicates that perform alternating sexual-asexual ...