Integrated omics unveil the secondary metabolic landscape of a basal dinoflagellate.
BMC Biol. 2020 Oct 13;18(1):139
Authors: Beedessee G, Kubota T, Arimoto A, Nishitsuji K, Waller RF, Hisata K, Yamasaki S, Satoh N…

Single cell transcriptomics of ABEDINIUM reveals a new early-branching dinoflagellate lineage.
Genome Biol Evol. 2020 Oct 12;:
Authors: Cooney EC, Okamoto N, Cho A, Hehenberger E, Richards TA, Santoro AE, Worden AZ…

CONCLUSIONS: Our genomic findings suggest intricate integration of various metabolic enzymes that function iteratively to synthesize metabolites, providing mechanistic insights into how dinoflagellates synthesize secondary metabolites, depending upon nutrient availability. This study provides insights into toxin production associated with dinoflagellate blooms. The genome of this basal dinoflagellate provides important clues about dinoflagellate evolution and overcomes the large genome size,…

Dinoflagellates possess many cellular characteristics with unresolved evolutionary histories. These include nuclei with greatly expanded genomes and chromatin packaged using histone-like proteins and dinoflagellate-viral nucleoproteins instead of histones, highly reduced mitochondrial genomes with extensive RNA editing, a mix of photosynthetic and cryptic secondary plastids, and tertiary plastids. Resolving the evolutionary origin of these traits requires understanding their ancestral states and…

Putative genome features of relic green alga-derived nuclei in dinoflagellates and future perspectives as model organisms.
Commun Integr Biol. 2020 Jun 21;13(1):84-88
Authors: Nakayama T, Takahashi K, Kamikawa R,…

Nucleomorphs, relic endosymbiont nuclei, have been studied as a model to elucidate the evolutionary process of integrating a eukaryotic endosymbiont into a host cell organelle. Recently, we reported two new dinoflagellates possessing nucleomorphs, and proposed them as new models in this research field based on the following findings: genome integration processes are incomplete, and the origins of the endosymbiont lineages were pinpointed. Here, we focused on the nucleomorph genome features in…