Model organisms are irreplaceable tools of fundamental biological research by boosting many major scientific breakthroughs in life science. However, less efforts have been devoted to establishing animal models for species-rich and highly diverse marine invertebrates such as molluscs. Especially, with many marine molluscs have entered into the post-genome era, there is an urgent need for developing mollusc models for functional genetic studies. Our group has been focusing on the dwarf surf clam (Mulinia lateralis), a promising bivalve model with many appealing features such as small body size, rapid development, ease of raising or breeding, etc. We have established the standardized aquatic facilities for artificial breeding and culture of M. lateralis in the laboratory, with attainable capacity of five generations per year. We generated abundant multi-omics resources, including haplotype-resolved genome, the full sets of transcriptomes covering all developmental stages and adult tissues, as well as single-cell sequencing data. The transgenic, CRISPR-based gene editing as well as flow cytometric based-cell sorting and in vitro cell culture have been preliminarily applied in M. lateralis, laying the foundation for decoding the function of interested genes. The successful application of these techniques makes M. lateralis a promising bivalve model and provides powerful functional tools for understanding the biology and evolution of molluscs.
Establishing a promising bivalve model and functional tools for understanding molluscan biology and evolution