A Large-Scale Study into Protist-Animal Interactions Based on Public Genomic Data Using DNA Barcodes

With the birth of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, genomic data in public databases have increased exponentially. Unfortunately, exogenous contamination or intracellular parasite sequences assemblies could confuse analysis. Meanwhile, they can provide a valuable resource for studies host-microbe interactions. Here, we used strategy based on DNA barcodes to scan protistan GenBank WGS/TSA database. The results showed total 13,952 metazoan/animal GenBank, where 17,036 contigs were found be contaminants 1507 (10.8%), with even higher rates taxa Cnidaria (150/281), Crustacea (237/480), and Mollusca (107/410). Taxonomic analysis protists derived from these variations abundance evenness across different metazoan taxa, reflecting host preferences Apicomplexa, Ciliophora, Oomycota Symbiodiniaceae mammals birds, Crustacea, insects, Cnidaria, respectively. Finally, mitochondrial proteins COX1 CYTB predicted contigs, phylogenetic corroborated origination heterogeneous distribution contaminated contigs. Overall, this study, conducted large-scale contaminant resources, detected will help uncover protist diversity relationships picoeukaryotes Metazoa.