We present a genome assembly from from a specimen of the clarki ecotype of an individual specimen of the lettuce sea slug Elysia crispata (lettuce sea slug; Mollusca; Gastropoda; Plakobranchidae). The genome sequence has a total length of 542.56 megabases. Most of the assembly (87.52%) is scaffolded into 15 chromosomal pseudomolecules. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled, with a length of 14.17 kilobases. Additionally, we sequenced the chloroplast genomes of two dietary algae, Penicillus capitatus and P. lamourouxii , from plastids sequestered inside of slug cells where they remain photosynthetically active. Gene annotation of this assembly by Ensembl identified 18 436 protein-coding genes. From the metagenome data, we recovered six bins, of which four were high-quality MAGs.
Middlebrooks et al. (2026) studied this question.