GBE The Draft Assembly of the Radically Organized Stylonychia lemnae Macronuclear Genome Samuel H. Aeschlimann1,FranziskaJo¨ nsson2,JanPostberg2,3, Nicholas A. Stover4, Robert L. Petera4, Hans-Joachim Lipps2,*, Mariusz Nowacki1,*, and Estienne C. Swart1,* 1Institute of Cell Biology, University of Bern, Switzerland 2Centre for Biological Research and Education (ZBAF), Institute of Cell Biology, Witten/Herdecke University, Wuppertal, Germany 3Department of Neonatology, HELIOS Children’s Hospital, Witten/Herdecke University, Wuppertal, Germany 4Biology Department, Bradley University *Corresponding author: E-mail:
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[email protected]. Accepted: June 16, 2014 Downloaded from Data deposition: The draft Stylonychia lemnae macronuclear genome assembly and Illumina shotgun sequence data have been deposited at European Nucleotide Archive under the project accession PRJEB5807. This genome assembly is accessible for community searches and annotation at StyloDB (stylo.ciliate.org). http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/ Abstract Stylonychia lemnae is a classical model single-celled eukaryote, and a quintessential ciliate typified by dimorphic nuclei: A small, germline micronucleus and a massive, vegetative macronucleus. The genome within Stylonychia’s macronucleus has a very unusual architecture, comprised variably and highly amplified “nanochromosomes,” each usually encoding a single gene with a minimal amount of surrounding noncoding DNA. As only a tiny fraction of the Stylonychia genes has been sequenced, and to promote research using this organism, we sequenced its macronuclear genome. We report the analysis of the 50.2-Mb draft S. lemnae macronuclear genome assembly, containing in excess of 16,000 complete nanochromosomes, assembled as less than 20,000 at World Trade Institute on July 15, 2014 contigs.