Okinawa Mozuku Genome Project

The brown alga, Cladosiphon okamuranus (Okinawa mozuku), is one of the major edible seaweeds, cultivated for market primarily in Okinawa, Japan. C. okamuranus constitutes a significant source of fucoidan, which has various physiological and biological activities. To facilitate studies of seaweed biology, we decoded the draft genome of C. okamuranus S-strain. The genome size of C. okamuranus was estimated as approximately 154 Mbp, smaller than those of two other brown algae, Ectocarpus siliculosus and Saccharina japonica. Approximately 100x coverage sequencing yielded an assembly of 722 scaffolds with N50=391 kbp. Together with transcriptome data, we estimated that the C. okamuranus genome contains 15,156 protein-coding genes, approximately 84% of which were substantiated by corresponding mRNAs.