%0 Journal Article %A Georgios Koutsovoulos %A Sujai Kumar %A Dominik R. Laetsch %A Lewis Stevens %A Jennifer Daub %A Claire Conlon %A Habib Maroon %A Fran Thomas %A Aziz Aboobaker %A Mark Blaxter %T The genome of the tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini %D 2015 %R 10.1101/033464 %J bioRxiv %P 033464 %X Tardigrades are meiofaunal ecdysozoans and are key to understanding the origins of Arthropoda. We present the genome of the tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini, assembled from Illumina paired and mate-pair data. While the raw data indicated extensive contamination with bacteria, presumably from the gut or surface of the animals, careful cleaning generated a clean tardigrade dataset for assembly. We also generated an expressed sequence tag dataset, a Sanger genome survey dataset and used these and Illumina RNA-Seq data for assembly validation and gene prediction. The genome assembly is ~135 Mb in span, has an N50 length of over 50 kb, and an N90 length of 6 kb. We predict 23,021 protein-coding genes in the genome, which is available in a dedicated genome browser at http://www.tardigrades.org. We compare our assembly to a recently published one for the same species and do not find support for massive horizontal gene transfer. Additional analyses of the genome are ongoing. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/12/01/033464.full.pdf