Emiliania huxleyi Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Emiliania huxleyi

Emiliania huxleyi is a unicellular, eukaryotic phytoplankton belonging to the class Coccolithophores of the phylum Haptophyta. E. huxleyi cells are covered with uniquely ornamented calcite (calcium carbonate) disks called coccoliths. They are the third most abundant group of phytoplankton, and during massive blooms they can cover over 100,000 square kilometers and are visible from space.

E. huxleyi plays a key role in biogeochemical cycle because of its ability to fix inorganic carbon into both photosynthetic and biomineralized product, resulting in exporting large amounts of carbon to deep water sediments. In addition to playing an important role in global carbon cycling, E. huxleyi also contributes to global sulfur cycling. During grazing E. huxleyi produces the climatically active trace gas dimethyl sulfide, emissions of which may contribute to marine cloud formation and climate regulation.

Assembly

The haploid genome is estimated to be 141.7 Mb and composed of more than 64% repetitive elements. The draft assembly consists of 7794 scaffolds representing 96% of the genome, and is available from the EMBL/Genbank/DDBJ databases under the accession GCA_000372725.1.

Annotation

Annotation for the Emiliania huxleyi genome has been derived from annotation submitted to the EMBL/Genbank/DDBJ databases (as the WGS project AHAL00000000); and enhanced by importing data from additional sources, principally UniProtKB and GOA. Non-coding RNA genes have been annotated using tRNAScan-SE (Lowe, T.M. and Eddy, S.R. 1997) , RFAM (Griffiths-Jones et al 2005), and RNAmmer (Lagesen K.,et al 2007); additional analysis tools have also been applied.

References

1. Pan genome of the phytoplankton Emiliania underpins its global distribution.
   Read BA, Kegel J, Klute MJ, Kuo A, Lefebvre SC, Maumus F, Mayer C, Miller J, Monier A, Salamov A et al. 2013. Nature. 499:209-213.

Picture credit: Alison R. Taylor, University of North Carolina Wilmington Microscopy Facility

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.