I just flew back from Montreal, where I gave a talk at the International Tunicate Meeting on the Molgula project. This is a project wherein we are doing quantitative mRNA sequencing on two species of ascidians, or sea squirts -- specifically, on M. oculata (tailed), M. occulta (tailless) -- and their hybrids. We just got some initial results from the sequencing, and so we took the opportunity to go up to Montreal and present on it.

In addition to my talk, I presented the same content in poster form, and Elijah Lowe presented some initial results on notochord genes, which are subtly wrong (my fault, long story) but still quite interesting.

Since the Molgulids are representatives of not-very-well studied branch of the ascidians, Stolidobranchs, we are also making some of our sequence available. Specifically, you can go to our "data" page, here, and grab about 40,000 transcripts assembled from our M. oculata mRNA sequencing efforts. Enjoy!

--titus