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View Article and Find Full Text PDFBenthic diatoms are the main primary producers in shallow freshwater and coastal environments, fulfilling important ecological functions such as nutrient cycling and sediment stabilization. However, little is known about their evolutionary adaptations to these highly structured but heterogeneous environments. Here, we report a reference genome for the marine biofilm-forming diatom Seminavis robusta, showing that gene family expansions are responsible for a quarter of all 36,254 protein-coding genes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTransposable elements (TEs), activated as a response to unfavorable conditions, have been proposed to contribute to the generation of genetic and phenotypic diversity in diatoms. Here we explore the transcriptome of three warm water strains of the diatom , and the possible involvement of TEs in their response to changing temperature conditions. At low temperature (13 °C) several stress response proteins were overexpressed, confirming low temperature to be unfavorable for , while TE-related transcripts of the LTR retrotransposon superfamily were the most enriched transcripts.
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