RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Comparative genomics of the tardigrades Hypsibius dujardini and Ramazzottius varieornatus JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 112664 DO 10.1101/112664 A1 Yuki Yoshida A1 Georgios Koutsovoulos A1 Dominik R. Laetsch A1 Lewis Stevens A1 Sujai Kumar A1 Daiki D. Horikawa A1 Kyoko Ishino A1 Shiori Komine A1 Takekazu Kunieda A1 Masaru Tomita A1 Mark Blaxter A1 Kazuharu Arakawa YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/01/112664.abstract AB Tardigrada, a phylum of meiofaunal organisms, have been at the center of discussions of the evolution of Metazoa, the biology of survival in extreme environments, and the role of horizontal gene transfer in animal evolution. Tardigrada are placed as sisters to Arthropoda and Onychophora (velvet worms) in the superphylum Ecdysozoa by morphological analyses, but many molecular phylogenies fail to recover this relationship. This tension between molecular and morphological understanding may be very revealing of the mode and patterns of evolution of major groups. Similar to bdelloid rotifers, nematodes and other animals of the water film, limno-terrestrial tardigrades display extreme cryptobiotic abilities, including anhydrobiosis and cryobiosis. These extremophile behaviors challenge understanding of normal, aqueous physiology: how does a multicellular organism avoid lethal cellular collapse in the absence of liquid water? Meiofaunal species have been reported to have elevated levels of HGT events, but how important this is in evolution, and in particular in the evolution of extremophile physiology, is unclear. To address these questions, we resequenced and reassembled the genome of Hypsibius dujardini, a limno-terrestrial tardigrade that can undergo anhydrobiosis only after extensive pre-exposure to drying conditions, and compared it to the genome of Ramazzottius varieornatus, a related species with tolerance to rapid desiccation. The two species had contrasting gene expression responses to anhydrobiosis, with major transcriptional change in H. dujardini but limited regulation in R. varieornatus. We identified few horizontally transferred genes, but some of these were shown to be involved in entry into anhydrobiosis. Whole-genome molecular phylogenies supported a Tardigrada+Nematoda relationship over Tardigrada+Arthropoda, but rare genomic changes tended to support Tardigrada+Arthropoda.