Accepted_test

Single-cell genomics – a powerful tool to resolve the phylogeny of uncultivable species of Amoebozoa

by Alexey Smirnov | Department of Invertebrate Zoology, faculty of Biology, Saint Petersburg University

Abstract ID: 650

Event: BGRS-abstracts

Sections: [Sym 5] Section “Molecular phylogenetics and phylogenomics of Plants, Fungi, Protists, Prokaryotes and Viruses”

Amoebozoa still remain one of the least studied lineages of protists. Unstable body shape, difficulty of cultivation and study and inability of most species to grow in culture make investigation of the diversity and phylogeny of this group very difficult, and in some cases – almost impossible. This problem seriously embarrassed further development of amoebozoan phylogeny. To solve the problem, several years ago we elaborated and successfully applied protocols and approaches allowing us to extract DNA from a single amoebozoan cell and to perform the whole-genome amplification of this DNA followed by NGS seqeuncing. Using these techniques, we successfully found home for several poorly studied lineages of Amoebozoa using both single-gene phylogeny and phylogenomic approaches. Obtaining whole-genome data allows direct building of multigene trees, which are much more reliable rather than the single gene tree. These studies solved several old and frequently mentioned puzzles in Amoebozoan phylogeny and significantly improved the overall tree of Amoebozoa.