Enigmatic genome of Abeoforma whisleri helps our understanding of the origin of animals

Abstract

Abeoforma whisleri is unicellular but is also one of closest relatives of animals. By studying Abeoforma and other unicellular relatives, we hope to reconstruct how the transition to multicellularity happened. Abeoforma recently was shown to exhibit spatial cell differentiation — a phenomena usually thought to be specific to complex multicellularity. Now,Abeoformacan change our understanding of the evolution of cell differentiation. However, its genome was not easy to assemble: neither with short reads, nor with nanopore. I will explain how to handle problematic genomes with nanopore sequencing and how the genome of Abeoforma helps us to understand the biology of this enigmatic organism.