The Honeycomb Worm Genome: Expanded Protein Kinase Repertoire and other Key FeaturesBiology & Ecophysiology

Flavia Nunes¹, Alexandre Cormier^1,2, Julien Robert¹, Elisabeth Hellec^1,3, David Goudenege¹, Patrick Durand¹, Laura Leroi¹, Edward Wilson¹, Charlotte Corporeau¹

¹Ifremer, France - ²CHU-Nantes, France - ³ANSES, France

The honeycomb worm, Sabellaria alveolata, is an important ecosystem engineer that supports biodiversity across much of the European coast. The genome of this reef-building species was sequenced in order to provide a reference for population and comparative genomic studies. Here, we describe several key features of the honeycomb worm genome. The genome was generated using Pacific Biosciences long-read sequencing and assembled using the Flye de novo assembler. Structural annotation was carried out using Helixer, while functional annotation was produced with the ORSON pipeline, which combines several annotation processes (BLAST, Diamond, BeeDeeM, InterProScan). In addition, our group has recently developed the KINEXT pipeline that uses Hidden Markov Models to identify protein kinases and assign them to kinase families. Protein kinases are important to many vital cellular and physiological processes, including roles in detecting environmental change and modulating cellular responses. A remarkable feature of the genome is the expanded protein kinase repertoire observed, comprised of 904 kinases compared with 540 in mouse and 518 kinases in human. In addition to protein kinases, we also examine genes associated with oxygen metabolism, stress response genes and regeneration.