Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus is an emerging model to understand stem cell evolution
Stem cells can’t hide what they are. At least, that’s the takeaway from the newly sequenced genomes of two colonial hydroids, Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus and Hydractinia echinata. I recently sat down with Dr. Christine Schnitzler of UF’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience to talk about her experience assembling these genomes — a huge collaboration that started pre-pandemic, slowed down during the pandemic, and finally culminated in a paper published in Genome Research in March. Our conversation covered topics spanning from the logistics of large collaborations (including the need to find the right people), the shared molecular vocabulary that stems from genome projects, and the scientific merit of studying emerging systems.
“All genome projects are huge,” said Schnitzler. “I would never have been able to do this myself.”
This particular project has been 10 years in the making. In that time, sequencing technologies and analyses kept changing. The research team opted to swap the Illumina short-read platform for Pac-Bio long-read sequencing to dig deeper into two unconventional model organisms: Hydractinia echinata and Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus.