Chromosomal-level genome assembly of the Antarctic sea urchin Sterechinus neumayeri, a model for Antarctic invertebrate biology.

The Antarctic sea urchin Sterechinus neumayeri (Echinoida;Echinidae) is routinely used as a model organism for Antarctic biology. Here, we present a high-quality genome of S. neumayeri. This chromosomal-level assembly was generated using PacBio long-read sequencing and HiC chromatin conformation capture sequencing. This 885.3 Mb assembly exhibits high contiguity with a scaffold length N50 of 36.7Mb assembled into 20 chromosomal length scaffolds. These putative chromosomes exhibit a high degree of synteny compared to other sea urchin models. We used transcript evidence gene modeling combined with sequence homology to identify 21,638 gene models that capture 97.4% of BUSCO orthologs. Among these, we were able to identify and annotate conserved developmental gene regulatory network orthologs, positioning S. neumayeri as a tractable model for comparative studies on evolution and development.

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© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.