Evolutionary patterns and repeated adaptive strategies of deep-sea anemones.

Deep-sea anemones show repeated dismantling of circadian and meiotic genes, indicating convergent genomic erosion across multiple lineages at depths of 432 to 6,000 meters.

• Why it matters: Understanding how deep-sea organisms adapt at the genomic level is crucial for revealing evolutionary strategies in extreme environments, yet this knowledge remains limited and contentious.
• What they did: Researchers assembled genomes and transcriptomes for 15 species collected across a broad depth range, integrating data with publicly available actiniarian sequences to analyze habitat-related genomic changes.
• The result: Despite extensive gene loss, deep-sea anemones exhibit molecular adaptations such as amino acid substitutions and gene family expansions that enhance enzyme performance and physiological functions in cold, high-pressure environments, suggesting a "loss-optimization-innovation" model of adaptation.