Abstract
Members of eustigmatophyte algae, especially Nannochloropsis and Microchloropsis, have been tapped for biofuel production owing to their exceptionally high lipid content. While extensive genomic, transcriptomic, and synthetic biology toolkits have been made available for Nannochloropsis, very little is known about other eustigmatophytes. Here we present three near-chromosomal and gapless genome assemblies of Monodopsis strains C73 and C141 (60 Mb) and Vischeria strain C74 (106 Mb), which are the sister groups to Nannochloropsis and Microchloropsis in the order Eustigmatales. These genomes contain unusually high percentages of simple repeats, ranging from 12\1\ LINE repeats are abundant in Monodopsis and Vischeria and might constitute the centromeric regions. We found that both mevalonate and non-mevalonate pathways for terpenoid biosynthesis are present in Monodopsis and Vischeria, which is different from Nannochloropsis and Microchloropsis that have only the latter. Our analysis further revealed extensive spliced leader trans-splicing in Monodopsis and Vischeria at 36-61\ the high-quality genomes of Monodopsis and Vischeria not only serve as the much-needed outgroups to advance Nannochloropsis and Microchloropsis research, but also shed new light on the biology and evolution of eustigmatophyte algae.
Original language | English |
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Article number | evab233 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Genome biology and evolution |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 11 |
Early online date | 19 Oct 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgmentThis study was supported by the National Science Foundation Dimensions of Biodiversity grant (1831428) to F.-W.L., and the Czech Science Foundation grant 20-27648S to M.E. We thank the reviewers and editor for their thoughtful comments
Data Availability Statement
The nanopore and Illumina sequencing reads were deposited in NCBI SRA under the BioProject PRJNA730568. The nuclear genome assemblies and annotations are available through NanDeSyn data portal (Gong et al. 2020) and https://figshare.com/s/c4bf156c2764ba410c30.Keywords
- Nannochloropsis
- spliced leader trans-splicing
- simple sequence repeats
- LINE
- Stramenopiles