Bathycoccus genetic diversity

While population-scale sequencing projects have become a standard practice to explore the natural genetic diversity underlying adaptation in land plants, current sequencing initiatives for eukaryotic phytoplankton primarily concentrate on creating reference genomes for model organisms and characterizing natural communities through metagenomics approaches. Consequently, few species have been thoroughly sequenced and intraspecific genetic diversity remains virtually undescribed, limiting our understanding of diversity and adaptation mechanisms. Here we report a biological and genomic resource to explore the genetic diversity of the cosmopolitan and ecologically important Bathycoccus genus. To span broad geographical and temporal scales, we selected available strains but also isolated and genotyped strains from both the Banyuls bay (Mediterranean sea) and the Baffin bay (Arctic ocean). By combining ONT long reads and Illumina short reads technologies, we produced and annotated 28 Bathycoccus sp. de novo assembled genomes of high quality, including 24 genomes of Bathycoccus prasinos strains along a latitudinal gradient between 40? and 78? North, one reference genome of the Bathycoccus calidus species and 3 genomes of a yet undescribed Bathycoccus species named Bathycoccus catiminus. The Bathycoccus biological and genomic resources offer a robust framework for investigating the diversity and adaptation mechanisms of eukaryotic phytoplankton in the Ocean.