Silhouette by Sara Ferrando

With an estimated lifespan of 392 years, the Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate known (Nielsen et al., 2016). In our manuscript, we present a chromosome-level assembly of the 6.45 Gb Greenland shark genome and compare it to shorter-lived sharks. We found that positive selection in this species primarily affects hallmarks of aging. Furthermore, we identified a unique insertion in the conserved C-terminal region of TP53 and a functionally connected network of gene duplications enriched for double-strand repair. According to our analysis, the evolution of these gene duplications was significantly driven by the strong expansion of retrotransposons in the Greenland shark.

Links to the genome browser and the manuscript preprint are below.