Meeting Abstract
Cnidarians provide an excellent opportunity to study the evolution of complexity and novelty as they possess an astounding diversity of habitat usage, body plan organization, and life history strategies. Building on the advances made possible by the Hydractinia genome sequencing project, we are generating high-quality whole-genome sequencing data for the closely related hydrozoan, Podocoryna carnea. In contrast to Hydractinia,P. carnea has a pelagic medusae (jellyfish) phase. This provides a unique opportunity for comparative studies aimed at identifying the genomic toolkit specific to production of this life cycle stage, one that is characterized by unique cell types, some of which are potentially convergent to cell types within the Bilateria. This genome project will also extend current work in Hydractinia on questions regarding allorecognition, sex determination, and population genomics in the context of a cnidarian possessing a pelagic life cycle stage. Further, these hydrozoans are easily culturable in the lab, allowing for additional experimentation on environmental effects and phenotypic plasticity. Our overall sequencing strategy involves a trio-binning assembly approach using both Illumina and PacBio data; this approach takes advantage of the high apparent heterozygosity revealed by preliminary sequencing data from P. carnea to produce a fully phased genome sequence. These high-quality genomic data, along with RNAseq data being generated in the context of functional experiments will provide a strong foundation for establishing P. carnea as an important model for evolutionary genomics.
