Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 27, 2025

Expression of Fluorescent Proteins in Branchiostoma lanceolatum by mRNA Injection into Unfertilized Oocytes
Published on: January 12, 2015
Deep whole-genome resequencing sheds light on the distribution and effect of amphioxus SNPs
Yunchi Zhu1, Na Lu1, J-Y Chen2
1State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
Background:
Amphioxus is a model organism for vertebrate evolutionary research. The significant contrast between morphological phenotypic similarity and high-level genetic polymorphism among amphioxus populations has aroused scientists' attention. Here we resequenced 21 amphioxus genomes to over 100X depth and mapped them to a haploid reference.
Results:
More than 11.5 million common SNPs were detected in the amphioxus population, which mainly affect genes enriched in ion transport, signal transduction and cell adhesion, while protein structure analysis via AlphaFold2 revealed that these SNPs fail to bring effective structural variants.
Conclusions:
Our work provides explanation for "amphioxus polymorphism paradox" in a micro view, and generates an enhanced genomic dataset for amphioxus research.
Related Concept Videos
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms-SNPs
Multi-species Conserved Sequences
Although the genome of each species varies greatly from each other, a few sequences are highly conserved. Such conserved...
Genome-wide Association Studies-GWAS
GWAS does not require the identification of the target gene involved in...

