Genome assemblies of C. elegans ALT survivor lines

Karyotype change and subsequent evolution is triggered by chromosome fusion and rearrangement events, which often occur when telomere becomes dysfunctional. Telomere is a structure that protects linear chromosome ends from DNA damage responses (DDRs), and the telomere dysfunction processing by DDRs may result in structural changes at the chromosome ends. However, the complex chromosome end structures and the other possible consequences of telomere dysfunction have rarely been resolved at the nucleotide level due to the lack of the high-throughput methods needed to analyse these highly repetitive sequences. Here we applied long-read whole genome sequencing technology to Caenorhabditis elegans survivor lines that emerged after telomere dysfunction to investigate such chromosomal structures at the nucleotide level.