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The California sea hare, Aplysia californica, is a species of gastropod molluscs found along the coast of California, United States, and northwestern Mexico. These sea slugs possess the largest nerve cells in the entire animal kingdom, making them a valuable model organism to study the neurobiology of learning and memory [1].

In 2003 Leonid L. Moroz (University of Florida) and Eric R. Kandel (Columbia University) initiated the sequencing of the whole genome of A. californica, which was approved as a priority by National Human Genome Research Institute in March 2005. The Broad Institute, using inbred lines of Aplysia (F4) raised by Tom Capo (NIH Aplysia facility) in collaboration with the Moroz lab generated the first draft assembly for the species in 2006, revised in 2009 and 2013 [2, 3]. Together with Leonid Moroz and his team at the University of Florida we are today releasing a chromosome-length assembly for A. californica based on the 2013 draft from the Broad Institute.


Check out whole-genome alignment of the new assembly to the 14 linkage groups of the channeled applesnail Pomacea canaliculata from (Liu et al., GigaScience, 2018), illustrating, for the first time ever, the conservation of chromosome content across 400 million years of gastropod evolution.


Whole-genome alignment of the new Aplysia californica assembly to the 14 linkage groups of Pomacea canaliculata, from (Liu et al., 2018).

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Updated: Feb 27, 2019

We are happy to announce the public release of the raw sequencing data for our first 64 species.


The data is shared on NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject accession PRJNA512907 and includes raw Hi-C data for 64 species and raw WGS data for 8 species. In total, the data spans 131 experiments and 7,294,602,040,208 bases!


We are grateful to Illumina, Macrogen, Novogene, the Broad Institute, BCM-HGSC and BCM GARP core for help in data production.


Our data policy is the usual.


Stay tuned for more!

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Writer's picture: Olga DudchenkoOlga Dudchenko

The red-bellied piranha, also known as the red piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri), is a species of piranha native to South America and a popular aquarium fish. Through media influence, the red-bellied piranha has developed a reputation as a ferocious predator, but scientists believe that the animals’ fearsome reputation has been exaggerated [1].


This week we are releasing the chromosome-length assembly for the red-bellied piranha, based on the work by W.C. Warren and M. Schartl [2]. We are grateful to Moody Gardens for the sample used for Hi-C library preparation!


Check out the alignments of the new assembly to the two most closely related fish genome assemblies out there: the Mexican tetra Astyanax mexicanus, from (McGaugh et al. Nat Commun., 2014), and the channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus, from (Liu et al. Nat Commun., 2016). Looks like the content of the chromosomes is largely preserved.

Whole genome alignments of the red-bellied piranha genome assembly to the assemblies of the Mexican tetra (left) and channel catfish (right).

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