Daphnia pulex (Common water flea, KAP4) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Daphnia pulex

Daphnia pulex, the common water flea, is a microcrustacean arthropod (typically 0.2-3.0 mm long) found ubiquitously in freshwater around the globe, predominately in small ponds and ephemeral pools. D. pulex live for around 10-30 days, but can live up to 100 days in the absence of predation. Their anatomy is easily studied, due to the see-through carapce which reveals the internal organs at work.

Daphnia pulex is sensitive to environmental changes and exhibits context-dependent responses (e.g. switching from clonal to sexual reproduction, or rapidly changing haemoglobin levels) that make it a sensible agent to assess the ecological impact of environmental fluctuations. Predation can induce a range of morphological changes in D. pulex. In response to kairomones (chemicals released by predatory insect larvae), D. pulex develop small protusions (neckteeth) that act as a defence mechanism. It can also change size to avoid either detection by larger vertebrate predators, or consumption by smaller invertebrate predators.

In addition to its usefulness in a variety of research areas (including ecology, toxicology, and physiology), in evolutionary terms Daphnia pulex is important as a representative of the sister group to the insects, and can highlight genes present in the pancrustacean common ancestor.

Picture credit: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons (Image source) Taxonomy ID 6669

(Text from Wikipedia.)

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

Assembly

The assembly presented here has been imported from INSDC and is linked to the assembly accession [GCA_021134715.1].

The total length of the assembly is 133196385 bp contained within 13 scaffolds. The scaffold N50 value is 12288052, the scaffold L50 value is 5. Assembly gaps span 400 bp. The GC% content of the assembly is 40.5%.

Annotation

Ensembl Metazoa displaying genes imported from NCBI RefSeq annotation release v100. Small RNA features, protein features, BLAST hits and cross-references have been computed by Ensembl Metazoa.