Caenorhabditis elegans Hawaiian Strain CB4856 Genome Assembly

Among the many wild isolates of C. elegans, one of the most genetically divergent and most heavily studied is CB4856, which was isolated in 1972 by Linda Holden from a pineapple field on the Hawaiian island of Maui (under the name HA8) (HODGKIN AND DONIACH 1997). It shows multiple phenotypic differences with N2, including production of a copulatory plug, aggregation (social) behavior, a lack of temperature-size dependence, growth rate, fecundity and RNAi insensitivity by feeding and drug resistance (DE BONO AND BARGMANN 1998; KAMMENGA et al. 2007; GHOSH et al. 2012; POLLARD AND ROCKMAN 2013; ANDERSEN et al. 2014) as well as gene expression differences (CAPRA et al. 2008; VINUELA et al. 2012; VOLKERS et al. 2013). We have undertaken the construction of a C. elegans Hawaiian strain CB4856 reference genome sequence.