Our understanding of the mechanisms that modulate gene expression in animals is strongly biased by studying a handful of model species that mainly belong to three groups: Insecta, Nematoda and Vertebrata. However, over half of the animal phyla belong to Spiralia, a morphologically and ecologically diverse animal clade with many species of economic and biomedical importance. Therefore, investigating genome regulation in this group is central to uncovering ancestral and derived features in genome functioning in animals, which can also be of significant societal impact. Here, we focus on five aspects of gene expression regulation to review our current knowledge of functional genomics in Spiralia. Although some fields, such as single-cell transcriptomics, are becoming more common, the study of chromatin accessibility, DNA methylation, histone post-translational modifications and genome architecture are still in their infancy. Recent efforts to generate chromosome-scale reference genome assemblies for greater species diversity and optimise state-of-the-art approaches for emerging spiralian research systems will address the existing knowledge gaps in functional genomics in this animal group.

中文翻译：

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螺旋藻的功能基因组学

通过研究主要属于三个类群的少数模型物种，我们对调节动物基因表达的机制的理解存在很大偏差：昆虫纲、线虫纲和脊椎动物纲。然而，超过一半的动物门属于螺旋动物门，螺旋动物门是一个形态和生态多样化的动物分支，拥有许多具有经济和生物医学重要性的物种。因此，研究该群体的基因组调控对于揭示动物基因组功能的祖先和衍生特征至关重要，这也可能产生重大的社会影响。在这里，我们重点关注基因表达调控的五个方面，回顾我们目前对螺旋藻功能基因组学的了解。尽管单细胞转录组学等一些领域正变得越来越普遍，但对染色质可及性、DNA甲基化、组蛋白翻译后修饰和基因组结构的研究仍处于起步阶段。最近为提高物种多样性而生成染色体规模参考基因组组装并优化新兴螺旋研究系统的最先进方法的努力将解决该动物群体功能基因组学中现有的知识差距。