Caenorhabditis inopinata, Transposons

We discovered Caenorhabditis inopinata, a sister species of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, in Ishigaki-island. Despite their close relationship, C. inopinata exhibits significant differences, being more than double the size of C. elegans and adopting a distinctly different lifestyle. We employ C. elegans-C. inopinata as a novel investigative platform to explore the mechanisms underlying genome evolution, including aspects related to gene families and transposons.