Comparative genomics points to ecological drivers of genomic divergence
among intertidal limpets
Abstract
Comparative genomic studies of closely related taxa are important for
our understanding of the causes of divergence on a changing Earth. This
being said, the genomic resources available for marine intertidal
molluscs are limited and currently, there are few publicly available
high-quality annotated genomes for intertidal habitats and for molluscs
in general. Here we report transcriptome assemblies for six species of
Patellogastropoda and genome assemblies and annotations for three of
these species (Scurria scurra, Scurria viridula, and Scurria zebrina).
Comparative analysis using these genomic resources suggest that there
was a large gene family contraction during the early evolutionary
history of Patellogastropoda (140-170 Mya) and recently diverging
lineages (10-20 Mya) have experienced similar amounts of contractions
and expansions but across different gene families. Furthermore,
differences among recently diverged species are reflected in variation
in the amount of coding and noncoding material in genomes, such as
amount of repetitive elements and lengths of transcripts and introns and
exons. Additionally, functional ontologies of species-specific and
duplicated genes together with demographic inference support the finding
that recent divergence among members of the genus Scurria aligns with
their unique ecological characteristics. Overall, the resources
presented here will be extremely valuable for future studies of
adaptation in molluscs and in intertidal habitats as a whole.