The Lumbricus rubellus genome project

Lumbricus rubellus is a common temperate earthworm, used as a 'model' species by many researchers and others working on the biology and ecology of the soil.

As part of our ongoing efforts to understand how L. rubellus (and other earthworms) 'make their living' we are undertaking a large scale genome sequencing project on this earthworm.

This project will involve the generation of gigabases of raw sequence data. These data will be assembled to yield a first draft genome sequence for L. rubellus. Sequencing has started, at the GenePool in Edinburgh, and results and updates will be posted on this website in the near future. We have choosen a single earthworm for sequencing; see here for information.

The genome sequencing project builds on the successful Lumbricus rubellus Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) project.
The EST project was initiated by Stephen Sturzenbaum (School of Biosciences, Cardiff, UK) and Oleg Georgiev (Molbiol, Zurich, Switzerland) in 2000 to aid the understanding of the relationship of earthworms with the environment. This project generated 577 L. rubellus sequences. In 2002 The EcoWorm Consortium gained funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to use "omic" technologies to catalogue the response cascades in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and L. rubellus exposed to a range of pollutants causing environmental concern. This project included the generation of over 20000 expressed sequence tags. Using a combination of informatics tools these sequences have been analysed and used to build a relational sequence database - LumbriBASE - which can be queried by both sequence similarity and annotation.
These resources have been used to investigate the following questions:

Are there specific molecular responses characteristic of the presence of biologically active pollutants?

Are these responses conserved between taxa?

Can we identify specific residue handling responses?

Can we identify responses governing life-cycle changes?

Can these responses be used to predict demographic effects?

In 2005 EST sequences from the earthworm Eisenia andrei were added to this database in collaboration with Prof Soon Cheol Park, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea