Search

Female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infect more than 400 million people each year with dangerous viral pathogens including dengue, yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya. Progress in understanding the biology of mosquitoes and developing the tools to fight them has been slowed by the lack of a high-quality genome assembly. Here we combine diverse technologies to produce the markedly improved, fully re-annotated AaegL5 genome assembly, and demonstrate how it accelerates mosquito science. We anchored physical and cytogenetic maps, doubled the number of known chemosensory ionotropic receptors that guide mosquitoes to human hosts and egg-laying sites, provided further insight into the size and composition of the sex-determining M locus, and revealed copy-number variation among glutathione S-transferase genes that are important for insecticide resistance. Using high-resolution quantitative trait locus and population genomic analyses, we mapped new candidates for dengue vector competence and insecticide resistance. AaegL5 will catalyse new biological insights and intervention strategies to fight this deadly disease vector.

Salamanders serve as important tetrapod models for developmental, regeneration and evolutionary studies. An extensive molecular toolkit makes the Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) a key representative salamander for molecular investigations. Here we report the sequencing and assembly of the 32-gigabase-pair axolotl genome using an approach that combined long-read sequencing, optical mapping and development of a new genome assembler (MARVEL). We observed a size expansion of introns and intergenic regions, largely attributable to multiplication of long terminal repeat retroelements. We provide evidence that intron size in developmental genes is under constraint and that species-restricted genes may contribute to limb regeneration. The axolotl genome assembly does not contain the essential developmental gene Pax3. However, mutation of the axolotl Pax3 paralogue Pax7 resulted in an axolotl phenotype that was similar to those seen in Pax3[sup./] and Pax7[sup./] mutant mice. The axolotl genome provides a rich biological resource for developmental and evolutionary studies., Author(s): Sergej Nowoshilow [1, 2, 3]; Siegfried Schloissnig (corresponding author) [4]; Ji-Feng Fei [5]; Andreas Dahl [3, 6]; Andy W. C. Pang [7]; Martin Pippel [4]; Sylke Winkler [1]; Alex [...]

Author(s): Jeong-Sun Seo (corresponding author) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; Arang Rhie [1, 2, 3]; Junsoo Kim [1, 4]; Sangjin Lee [1, 5]; Min-Hwan Sohn [1, 2, 3]; Chang-Uk Kim [...]