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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Selective Cleaning of Wild Caenorhabditis Nematodes to Enrich for Intestinal Microbiome Bacteria
Published on: August 13, 2021
Conservation of long-range synteny and microsynteny between the genomes of two distantly related nematodes
D B Guiliano1, N Hall, S J M Jones
1Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK.
Background:
Comparisons between the genomes of the closely related nematodes Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae reveal high rates of rearrangement, with a bias towards within-chromosome events. To assess whether this pattern is true of nematodes in general, we have used genome sequence to compare two nematode species that last shared a common ancestor approximately 300 million years ago: the model C. elegans and the filarial parasite Brugia malayi.
Results:
An 83 kb region flanking the gene for Bm-mif-1 (macrophage migration inhibitory factor, a B. malayi homolog of a human cytokine) was sequenced. When compared to the complete genome of C. elegans, evidence for conservation of long-range synteny and microsynteny was found. Potential C. elegans orthologs for II of the 12 protein-coding genes predicted in the B. malayi sequence were identified. Ten of these orthologs were located on chromosome I, with eight clustered in a 2.3 Mb region. While several, relatively local, intrachromosomal rearrangements have occurred, the order, composition, and configuration of two gene clusters, each containing three genes, was conserved. Comparison of B. malayi BAC-end genome survey sequence to C. elegans also revealed a bias towards intrachromosome rearrangements.
Conclusions:
We suggest that intrachromosomal rearrangement is a major force driving chromosomal organization in nematodes, but is constrained by the interdigitation of functional elements of neighboring genes.
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