TY  - JOUR
A1  - Plessy, Charles
A1  - Mansfield, Michael J.
A1  - Bliznina, Aleksandra
A1  - Masunaga, Aki
A1  - West, Charlotte
A1  - Tan, Yongkai
A1  - Liu, Andrew W.
A1  - Grašič, Jan
A1  - del Río Pisula, María Sara
A1  - Sánchez-Serna, Gaspar
A1  - Fabrega-Torrus, Marc
A1  - Ferrández-Roldán, Alfonso
A1  - Roncalli, Vittoria
A1  - Navratilova, Pavla
A1  - Thompson, Eric M.
A1  - Onuma, Takeshi
A1  - Nishida, Hiroki
A1  - Cañestro, Cristian
A1  - Luscombe, Nicholas M.
T1  - Extreme genome scrambling in marine planktonic Oikopleura dioica cryptic species
Y1  - 2024/03/01 
JF  - Genome Research 
JO  - Genome Research 
SP  - 426 
EP  - 440 
DO  - 10.1101/gr.278295.123 
VL  - 34 
IS  - 3 
UR  - http://genome.cshlp.org/content/34/3/426.abstract 
N2  - Genome structural variations within species are rare. How selective constraints preserve gene order and chromosome structure is a central question in evolutionary biology that remains unsolved. Our sequencing of several genomes of the appendicularian tunicate Oikopleura dioica around the globe reveals extreme genome scrambling caused by thousands of chromosomal rearrangements, although showing no obvious morphological differences between these animals. The breakpoint accumulation rate is an order of magnitude higher than in ascidian tunicates, nematodes, Drosophila, or mammals. Chromosome arms and sex-specific regions appear to be the primary unit of macrosynteny conservation. At the microsyntenic level, scrambling did not preserve operon structures, suggesting an absence of selective pressure to maintain them. The uncoupling of the genome scrambling with morphological conservation in O. dioica suggests the presence of previously unnoticed cryptic species and provides a new biological system that challenges our previous vision of speciation in which similar animals always share similar genome structures. 
ER  -