Exploring The Genome of The Oribatid Mite, Oppia Nitens – Environmental Stress Response and Toxicity Adaptation

Oribatid mites are one of the most abundant groups of microarthropods in soil. Oppia nitens , belonging to the family Oppiidae, one of the largest and most diverse families of oribatid mites, has been developed as a standardized model test organism for assessing soil contamination. However, the limited availability of genomic information for this species hinders our understanding of its physiological adaptation and sensitivity to chemical and environmental stressors in soil. Hence, we present the annotated O. nitens draft genome assembled using both Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Illumina sequencing platforms as a basis to identify potential genes that can be linked to adaptation to chemical and environmental stressors.

The sequences were assembled into 65 scaffolds spanning 125.4Mb with a 24.5% GC content and an N50 length of 4.41Mb. Genome quality and completeness were checked using arthropod Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) analysis, which identified 93.5 % complete single-copy orthologs, 3.4% complete but duplicated orthologs, 0.5% fragmented, and 2.6% missing orthologs (n=2934). The NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline annotated 15,291 genes, 16,969 mRNAs, and 14,938 proteins.

Here, we describe the O. nitens complete draft genome and discuss its utility as a genetic basis for further investigations and understanding of the molecular mechanisms and physiological functions in adaptations to environmental change, especially tolerance to metal stress.