The Hydractinia Genome Project Portal: multi-omic annotation and visualization of Hydractinia genomic datasets

The colonial hydroid Hydractinia exhibits several unique biological properties, including its remarkable regenerative capacity and the ability to distinguish self from non-self, characteristics that make them valuable models for studying human disease and aging. The availability of well-annotated multi-omic data, as well as tools to visualize these data, is essential for advancing the use of these model organisms to enhance our understanding of the relationship between genomic and morphological complexity, the evolution of multicellularity, and the emergence of novel cell types.

We present the Hydractinia Genome Project Portal, a comprehensive resource providing genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic datasets for two widely studied Hydractinia species. The portal provides extensive sequence, structure, and functional annotation resources that are not available elsewhere, including genome browsers, a single-cell gene expression atlas, a protein structure viewer, and a custom BLAST implementation. We demonstrate the portal's utility for biological discovery and have used a subset of Hydractinia-specific stem cell gene markers to explore known gaps in annotation transfer methods, illustrating how structure-based deep learning methods such as DeepFRI can significantly improve the functional annotation of heretofore unannotated i-cell markers.

The Hydractinia Genome Project Portal is freely available at https://research.nhgri.nih.gov/hydractinia.