Assembled chromosomes of the blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni provide insight into the evolution of its ZW sex-determination system

Schistosoma mansoni has a diploid genome of approximately 380 MB, organized in 7 pairs of autosomes and 2 sex chromosomes. The original Schistosoma mansoni Genome Project was completed by the Wellcome Sanger Institute in collaboration with The Institute for Genome Research using a Whole Genome Shotgun sequencing strategy. The draft assembly was subsequently improved first by incorporating Illumina reads from a clonal (single-miracidial) infection and more recently by incorporating long PacBio reads, HiC, and optical mapping data.

Associated manuscript can be found at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.13.456314v1