Ting Chen, Chunhua Ren, Nai-Kei Wong, Aifen Yan, Caiyun Sun, Dingding Fan, Peng Luo, Xiao Jiang, Lvping Zhang, Yao Ruan, Jiaxi Li, Xiaofen Wu, Da Huo, Jiasheng Huang, Xiaomin Li, Feifei Wu, Zixuan E, Chuhang Cheng, Xin Zhang, Yanhong Wang, Chaoqun Hu
Some tropical sea cucumbers of the family Holothuriidae can efficiently repel or even fatally ensnare predators by sacrificially ejecting a bioadhesive matrix termed the Cuvierian organ (CO), so named by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier who first described it in 1831. Still, the precise mechanisms for how adhesiveness genetically arose in CO and how sea cucumbers perceive and transduce danger signals for CO expulsion during defense have remained unclear. Here, we report the first high-quality, chromosome-level genome assembly of Holothuria leucospilota , an ecologically significant sea cucumber with prototypical CO...
April 18, 2023: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America