Caenorhabditis species 5

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Caenorhabditis species 5 is a member of the Elegans group of species, which morphologically resembles C. elegans itself and is closely grouped with it evolutionarily (Kiontke et al., 2011). It is a gonochoristic species, requiring mating between males and females for reproduction, and the closest outgroup to the interfertile pair of hermaphroditic C. briggsae and male-female C. sp. 9. Its geographic distribution is remarkably confined to East Asia (Google Maps), being commonly found in China and northern Vietnam, particularly in habitats with moist decaying vegetation. C. sp. 5 shows strikingly high molecular diversity, assayed by SNP variability (Wang et al., 2010); however, its codon usage patterns are similar to those of C. elegans (Cutter et al., 2008).

Cutter A.D., Wasmuth J.D. and Washington N.L. (2008). Patterns of molecular evolution in Caenorhabditis preclude ancient origins of selfing. Genetics 178, 2093-2104.

Kiontke K.C., Felix M.A., Ailion M., Rockman M.V., Braendle C., Penigault J.B. and Fitch D.H. (2011). A phylogeny and molecular barcodes for Caenorhabditis, with numerous new species from rotting fruits. BMC Evol. Biol. 11,339.

Wang G.X., Ren S., Ren Y., Ai H. and Cutter A.D. (2010). Extremely high molecular diversity within the East Asian nematode Caenorhabditis sp. 5. Mol. Ecol. 19, 5022-5029.

Bursaphelenchus xylophilus on WormBase

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The newly published Bursaphelenchus xylophilus (Kikuchi et.al) is as of WS229 available at WormBase including it’s gene set. The data are available as GFF3 and FASTA files for download, and has been added to GBrowse and BLAST.

Bursaphelenchus xylophilus is a pine parasite causing considerable economic damage and can give insights into evolution of plant parasites by comparing it, for example, to Meloidogyne.

Ascaris suum genome in WormBase

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The newly published Ascaris suum genome (Aaron Jex, et al, Nature 2011 Oct 2) is available at WormBase including it’s geneset. The data has been added to GBrowse/BLAT/BLAST and can be downloaded as FASTA/GFF3 files from the WormBase FTP server.

Ascaris suum is a model for other parasitic Ascaris, as well as causing itself economic damage to pig farming. In addition it is known to be resistant to a large number of antihelminth chemicals.