Pseudo-nitzschia multistriata Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Pseudo-nitzschia multistriata

Pseudo-nitzschia is a marine planktonic diatom genus that accounts for 4.4% of pennate diatoms found worldwide. Some species are capable of producing the neurotoxin domoic acid (DA), which is responsible for the neurological disorder in humans known as amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP). Currently, 58 species are known, 28 of which have been shown to produce DA. It was originally hypothesized that only dinoflagellates could produce harmful algal toxins, but a deadly bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia occurred in 1987 in the bays of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and led to an outbreak of ASP. Over 100 people were affected by this outbreak after consuming contaminated mussels; three people died. Since this event, no additional deaths have been attributed to ASP, though the prevalence of toxic diatoms and DA has increased worldwide. This anomaly is likely due to increased awareness of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and their implications for human and ecosystem health.

Picture credit via Wikimedia Commons (Image source)

Taxonomy ID 183589

(Text from Wikipedia.)

More information General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia

To produce the genome sequence, we used an axenic offspring of two F1 siblings obtained by crossing two wild type strains isolated in the Gulf of Naples (Italy). The genome was assembled from a total of 172 million 101 bp overlapping paired end reads with ~175 bp inserts, 117 million 100 bp paired end reads with ~450 bp inserts, 72 million ~68 bp (after trimming) mate pair reads with ~1.2 KBp inserts and 5.4 million ~156 bp (after trimming) mate pair reads with ~4.5 Kbp inserts. The final size of the assembled Psuedo-nitzschia multistriata genome is 59.3 Mbp including ambiguous bases.

Ab-initio gene prediction supported by genomic alignments of proteins from other species and RNAseq reads from multiple samples resulted in prediction of 12152 transcripts in 12008 genes.