Journal
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 36, Issue 4, Pages 727-741Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msz010
Keywords
female heterogamety; recombination; homomorphy; hybrid de novo genome assembly; Wolbachia; repeats
Funding
- European Research Council Starting grant [260729]
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche [ANR-15-CE32-0006-01]
- European Regional Development Fund (FEDER)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
- University of Poitiers
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant [ANR-15-CE32-0011-01]
- State-Region Planning Contracts (CPER)
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [ANR-15-CE32-0011] Funding Source: Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
- European Research Council (ERC) [260729] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
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The terrestrial isopod Armadillidium vulgare is an original model to study the evolution of sex determination and symbiosis in animals. Its sex can be determined by ZW sex chromosomes, or by feminizing Wolbachia bacterial endosymbionts. Here, we report the sequence and analysis of the ZW female genome of A. vulgare. A distinguishing feature of the 1.72 gigabase assembly is the abundance of repeats (68% of the genome). We show that the Z and W sex chromosomes are essentially undifferentiated at the molecular level and the W-specific region is extremely small (at most several hundreds of kilobases). Our results suggest that recombination suppression has not spread very far from the sex-determining locus, if at all. This is consistent with A. vulgare possessing evolutionarily young sex chromosomes. We characterized multiple Wolbachia nuclear inserts in the A. vulgare genome, none of which is associated with the W-specific region. We also identified several candidate genes that may be involved in the sex determination or sexual differentiation pathways. The A. vulgare genome serves as a resource for studying the biology and evolution of crustaceans, one of the most speciose and emblematic metazoan groups.
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