Image credits: Giacomo Moggioli
Dimorphilus gyrociliatus (O. Schmidt, 1857)
Dimorphilus gyrociliatus is a meiofaunal annelid worm with an extreme sexual dimorphism and a simplified body plan. Differently from other annelid worms, D. gyrociliatus has only six body segments and lack chaetae, parapodia, a blood vascular system and a larval stage.
Interestingly, D. gyrociliatus has the smallest annelid genome known so far, with only ~72 Mb. In 2020, we sequenced and analysed the small genome of this miniature worm, in collaboration with Andreas Hejnol and Katrine Worsaae labs. We demonstrated that the genome of D. gyrociliatus shows a conserved developmental toolkit, traces of ancestral bilaterian linkage and canonical features of genome regulation, suggesting that animal genomes can follow more conservative routes to genome compaction than previously thought.
Reference
Martín-Durán JM, et al. (2020) Conservative route to genome compaction in a miniature annelid. Nature Ecology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01327-6
Resources
All sequence data associated with D. gyrociliatus genome are available under primary accession PRJEB37657 in the European Nucleotide Archive. The annotated assembly of D. gyrociliatus is publicly available under primary accession GCA_904063045 in the European Nucleotide Archive.
In addition, some of the datasets generated for this study are publicly available in our GitHub lab repository and as supplementary data to the publication.