Acorn Worm Genome Project

"Eichelwurm" by User Necrophorus on de.wikipedia - Foto: de:Benutzer:Necrophorus. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

About the Project

The BCM-HGSC is sequencing the genome of the acorn worm (Saccoglossus kowalevskii). The acorn worm is a hemichordate on a branch of the evolutionary tree between chordates(vertebrates and sea squirt) and echinoderms (sea urchin). The genome sequence is expected to yield insights about evolution, including the origin of chordates, the origin of deuterostomes and the origin of bilateral animals.

The acorn worm Genome Sequencing Consortium is led by the BCM-HGSC. The goal of the project is to produce a six-fold WGS shotgun draft assembly.

An introductory meeting of the acorn worm genome project was held at the BCM-HGSC in 2005 with John Gerhart, Christopher Lowe, and Marc Kirschner. The research community has constructed the following resources:

  • a 13x coverage 130kb BAC library

  • three cDNA libraries from different developmental stages

  • EST data representing ~20,000 unique genes

The sequencing and comparative analysis is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH).

 

Genomic Resources