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High-quality genome assemblies of corals highlight the specifics of their long lifespan
Archive ouverte
Edité par CCSD -
International audience. During the last decade, several coral genomes have been sequenced allowing a betterunderstanding of these symbiotic organisms threatened by climate change. Scleractiniancorals have an important ecological role and are an essential element of the reefs, whichshelter a great diversity of species. Here we generated two coral genomes, Porites lobataand Pocillopora meandrina with unprecedented contiguity that allowed us to study the functional organization of these genomes. We annotated their gene catalogue and reported arelatively higher gene number than that found in other corals. This finding is explained bya high number of tandemly duplicated genes, which are generally difficult to assemble andannotate, especially using short-read technologies. These duplicated genes, which originatefrom multiple and distinct events in the coral lineage, belong to gene-families linked to theimmune system and disease-resistance which we suggest to be a functional consequence oftheir long lifespan.