RNA-Seq analysis of developmental, juvenile, and anhydrobiotic stages of Hypsibius dujardini and Ramazzottius varieornatus

Limno-terrestrial tardigrades enter a state called anhydrobiosis when exposed to desiccation, and acquire tolerance against various extreme environments. The anhydrobiotic tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini, is a non-pigmented tardigrade easy to culture and RNAi method have been established, therefore making it a model tardigrade for tardigrade molecular research. Previous genome assemblies of this tardigrade had increased size due to heterozygosity. Here, we have sequenced the genome of H. dujardini using single individual Illumina DNA-Seq data and PacBio long read data, and employed a heterozygosity aware assembly method to assemble a near-complete high quality genome. In order to annotate the genome with gene predictions, we conducted RNA-Sequencing of various stages of developmental, juvenile, adult, and anhydrobiotic stage H. dujardini and Ramazzottius varieornatus, a tardigrade capable of rapid anhydrobiosis entry, and used these data for gene prediction with BRAKER v1.9 or differential gene expression analysis of the active and anhydrobiotic stages. Overall design: We obtained RNA-Seq data for the developmental, juvenile, active, and Tun stages of Hypsibius dujardini and Ramazzottius varieornatus, N=3 for each sample.