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Species
Species Overview
Ciona intestinalis is a solitary ascidian (sea squirt) widely distributed in temperate and cold coastal waters worldwide, often found attached to docks, pilings, and rocky substrates. Adults are sessile, cylindrical, and semi-transparent, reaching up to 15 cm in height, with two prominent siphonsโan oral (incurrent) and an atrial (excurrent) siphon. They are filter feeders, drawing seawater through the oral siphon and trapping phytoplankton and organic particles on a mucous sheet in the pharyngeal basket. The species is a hermaphrodite with self-incompatibility mechanisms promoting cross-fertilization. Its larvae are tadpole-shaped and possess a notochord, dorsal nerve cord, and tailโkey chordate features lost during metamorphosis into the sessile adult form. C. intestinalis is one of the most important model organisms in developmental biology and genomics. Its compact genome (~160 Mb, ~16,000 genes) was sequenced in 2002 and revealed insights into the minimal chordate gene set. Recent taxonomic revisions have split C. intestinalis into two cryptic species, with many laboratory populations now reclassified as Ciona robusta. The species is also considered invasive in many harbors worldwide, where it can foul aquaculture equipment and outcompete native organisms.
Integrated UMAP Atlas & Gene Explorer
Provisional atlas release
This view is a provisional release built from a public dataset (Cao et al., Nature 2019, PMID 31292549; whole-embryo samples spanning 10 developmental stages from gastrula to swimming larva) that has not yet completed the LACA annotation pipeline: cell groups are unsupervised Leiden clusters without curated cell-type names, and the embedding was recomputed by LACA (normalize/HVG/PCA/UMAP) without batch correction. Gene search is disabled pending the curated release.
98,241 cells ยท provisional clusters Loading UMAP for Vase tunicateโฆ
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