TY - JOUR T1 - The genome of the tardigrade <em>Hypsibius dujardini</em> JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/033464 SP - 033464 AU - Georgios Koutsovoulos AU - Sujai Kumar AU - Dominik R. Laetsch AU - Lewis Stevens AU - Jennifer Daub AU - Claire Conlon AU - Habib Maroon AU - Fran Thomas AU - Aziz Aboobaker AU - Mark Blaxter Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/01/033464.abstract N2 - 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. ER -