This repository contains data and scripts for:

Beauty in the beast - Placozoan biodiversity explored through molluscan predator genomics

Full Journal citation

Eitel, M., Osigus, H.-J., Brenzinger, B., & Wörheide, G. (2024). Beauty in the beast – Placozoan biodiversity explored through molluscan predator genomics. Ecology and Evolution, 14(4), e11220. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11220

Abstract

The marine animal phylum Placozoa is characterized by a poorly explored cryptic biodiversity combined with very limited knowledge on their ecology. While placozoans are typically found as part of the epibenthos of coastal waters, known placozoan predators, namely small, shell-less sea slugs belonging to the family Rhodopidae (Mollusca: Gastropoda: Heterobranchia), inhabit the interstitium of seafloor sediment. In order to gain further insights into this predator- prey-relationship and to enlarge our understanding on placozoan ecological niches, we screened publicly available whole body metagenomic data from two rhodopid specimens collected from coastal sediments. Our analysis not only revealed signatures of three previously unknown placozoan lineages in these sea slug samples, but also enabled the assembly of three complete and two partial mitochondrial chromosomes belonging to four previously described placozoan genera, substantially extending of picture of placozoan biodiversity. Our findings furthermore refine the molecular phylogeny of the Placozoa, corroborate the recently established taxonomic ranks in this phylum, and provide molecular support that known placozoan clades should be referred to as genera. We finally discuss the main finding of our study – the presence of placozoan in the sea floor sediment interstitium – in the context of their ecological, biological, and natural history implications.

Included data

assembly_scripts folder

Contains bash scripts used for SPAdes assemblies of metagenomic reads.

distance_analyses folder (Figures 3, S1, S2)

Contains genetic distance data and Rscripts used to generate plots related to distance analyses.

phylogenetic_inferences folder (Figure 1)

Contains input (individual and concatenated alignments) and output files for Bayesian (mrbayes) and Maximum Likelihood (iqtree) analyses to infer phylogenetic relationships using nucleotide (CDS_nt) and amino acid (CDS_aa) sequences of the mitochondrial protein-coding genes (COX1-3, CYTB, NAD1-6, ATP6) as well as the two concatenated mitochondrial ribosomal subunits (12S, 16S).

sequence_data_ folder

Contains all sequence information generated: Annotated mitochondrial genomes & single gene/protein sequences and alignments