MEDINA, M�nica; Joint Genome Institute: Cnidarian Genomics at the Joint Genome Institute

The availability of powerful genomic tools has triggered an immense interest in comparative metazoan biology. With several of the genomes from model organisms, either complete, or well underway, there is now room for the use of these modern approaches to understand the biology of non-model organisms using a whole genome approach. Cnidarians, because of their basal placement in the animal tree and their key ecological roles in marine environments, are obvious candidates as targets of this new revolution. By taking advantage of our high throughput capacity, we are currently looking at different aspects of cnidarian ecology and evolution. One of our objectives is to understand phylogenetic relationships among scleractinian corals, and to attain this goal we are sequencing complete mitochondrial genomes from diverse lineages. A second aspect of our research focuses on the interactions between hard corals and their photosynthetic symbionts by using microarray gene expression profiling. Finally, we are in the process of sequencing the complete genome of the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis. This outgroup genome sequence will be instrumental in understanding the key genomic innovations that took place along the early bilaterian branch.