T2T genomes of Caenorhabditis nigoni and Caenorhabditis briggsae reveal divergence in satellite DNA abundance

The two closely related nematode species, Caenorhabditis nigoni and Caenorhabditis briggsae , are commonly used to study the evolution of reproductive modes in animals, with the self-fertile C. briggsae and outcrossing C. nigoni sharing a common ancestor ∼3.5 million years ago. Earlier genomic analyses revealed that selfing Caenorhabditis species have smaller genomes and proposed that at least some gene loss in C. briggsae is adaptive. However, the incomplete C. nigoni reference genome has limited most comparative analyses to genic regions. Here, we leverage long-read sequencing to generate and annotate telomere-to-telomere (T2T) assemblies for the C. nigoni strain JU1422 and the C. briggsae strain AF16. This new 139 Mb C. nigoni genome resolves 57 gaps and 149 unassigned scaffolds from the previous genome assembly. A major driver of the size difference with the 107 Mb T2T C. briggsae genome is the abundance of satellite DNA, which accounts for 12.8 Mb (9.2%) in C. nigoni and only 3.2 Mb (3.0%) in C. briggsae . Notably, the C. nigoni X Chromosome is 13.4 Mb larger than in the previous assembly, making it 60% larger than the C. briggsae X Chromosome compared with 18%–26% difference for the autosomes. We also document a surprising degree of plasticity in the ribosomal DNA, with the C. nigoni X Chromosome harboring a second 45S rDNA array that is absent in C. briggsae . The hitherto undocumented divergence in the abundance of repetitive DNA elements makes the new genomes an invaluable resource for genomic analysis.