Trichoplax adhaerens (Placozoa, Grell-BS-1999) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Trichoplax adhaerens

Trichoplax adhaerens is one of the most simple free-living sea-water animals, a member of the Placozoa phylum. The rationale for sequencing the genome was to gain insight into the evolution of animal life.

Picture credit (Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 DE): Oliver Voigt 2006

Assembly

The T. adhaerens genome was sequenced and assembled by the Joint Genome Institute in August 2006. It consists of about 98 Mb in 1,415 scaffolds. The annotations were released in July 2007 and published in 2008. In release 19 of Ensembl Metazoa we removed a supercontig (scaffold_3840) that had been in previous releases, to ensure consistency with the INSDC record.

Annotation

Genome annotation involved an ab initio approach using FGENESH and homology-based methods using FGENESH+ and Genewise. There are 11,520 non-redundant gene predictions constitute in release 1.0 of the gene set. Noncoding 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); BLAST hits, protein features, and cross-references have also been computed.

References

1. The Trichoplax genome and the nature of placozoans.
   Srivastava M, Begovic E, Chapman J, Putnam NH, Hellsten U, Kawashima T, Kuo A, Mitros T, Salamov A, Carpenter ML et al. 2008. Nature. 454:955-960.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.