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National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 18(113), p. 5053-5058, 2016

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1600338113

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No evidence for extensive horizontal gene transfer in the genome of the tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini

Journal article published in 2015 by Georgios Koutsovoulos ORCID, Sujai Kumar ORCID, Dominik R. Laetsch ORCID, Lewis Stevens, Jennifer Daub, Claire Conlon, Habib Maroon, Fran Thomas, Aziz A. Aboobaker ORCID, Mark Blaxter ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Significance Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets or water bears, are renowned for their ability to withstand extreme environmental challenges. A recently published analysis of the genome of the tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini by Boothby et al. concluded that horizontal acquisition of genes from bacterial and other sources might be key to cryptobiosis in tardigrades. We independently sequenced the genome of H. dujardini and detected a low level of horizontal gene transfer. We show that the extensive horizontal transfer proposed by Boothby et al. was an artifact of a failure to eliminate contaminants from sequence data before assembly.