Background:
Earthworms are annelids. They play a major role in agriculture and soil fertility. Vermicompost is the best organic manure for plant crops. Eudrilus eugeniae is an earthworm well
suited for efficient vermicompost production. The worm is also used to study the cell and molecular
biology of regeneration, molecular toxicology, developmental biology, etc., because of its abilities like
high growth rate, rapid reproduction, tolerability toward wide temperature range, and less cost of
maintenance.
Objective:
The whole genome has been revealed only for Eisenia andrei and Eisenia fetida.
Methods:
In the present work, we sequenced the genome of E. eugeniae using the Illumina platform
and generated 160,684,383 paired-end reads
Results:
The reads were assembled into a draft genome of size 488 Mb with 743,870 contigs and successfully annotated 24,599 genes. Further, 208 stem cell-specific genes and 3,432 non-coding genes
were identified.