Sequencing and Assembling the Nuclear Genome of the Antarctic Psychrophilic Green Alga Chlamydomonas sp. UWO241: Unravelling the Evolution of Cold Adaptation
DNA sequencing technologies have undergone tremendous advancements in recent years, but assembling, annotating, and analyzing a nuclear genome is still a huge undertaking, especially for small laboratory groups, partly because many eukaryotic genomes are repeat-rich and contain thousands of genes an...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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Scholarship@Western
2021
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| Online Access: | https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7609 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/10056/viewcontent/Unravelling_Cold_Adaptation_via_the_Genome_of_Antarctic_Psychrophilic_Green_Alga.pdf |
| Summary: | DNA sequencing technologies have undergone tremendous advancements in recent years, but assembling, annotating, and analyzing a nuclear genome is still a huge undertaking, especially for small laboratory groups, partly because many eukaryotic genomes are repeat-rich and contain thousands of genes and introns. The Antarctic harbors a variety of algae that can withstand extreme cold but do not grow at warmer temperatures (psychrophiles), including the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas sp. UWO241 (a.k.a. UWO241). Little is known, however, about how psychrophilic algae evolved from their respective mesophilic ancestors by adapting to particular cold environments. To present insights into this issue,I critically determined the draft nuclear genome (~212 Mb, 16,325 protein-coding genes) sequence of UWO241 and performed comparative genomic analyses. Firstly, an assembly pipeline was developed for processing high throughput sequencing (DNA-Seq) reads into genomic contigs. These contigs, alongside transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) reads, were fed into an annotation pipeline, containing the commonly used bioinformatics gene-profiling software. Computational analyses were carried out on a powerful in-house computer. Finally, comparative genomic analyses were performed between UWO241 and its close green algal relatives in the Chlamydomonadales revealing: (1) UWO241 harbors hundreds of highly similar duplicate genes involved in diverse cellular processes, some of which I argue are aiding its survival in the Antarctic via gene dosage; (2) UWO241 encodes a large number (³37) of ice-binding proteins (IBPs), putatively originating from horizontal gene transfer; and (3) UWO241 appears to have an expanded set of orthologous gene families for reverse transcriptase, IBPs and antenna proteins. These investigations deepen our understanding of evolution between psychrophilic and mesophilic algae and help unravel the existence of common mechanisms in the adaptation to cold environments. |
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