Genetic diversity in the asexual planarian Schmidtea mediterranea
Some multicellular species reproduce solely by self-bisection, thus avoiding both sex and reproductive single cell bottlenecks. This study investigates how the asexual strain of a freshwater planarian species Schmidtea mediterranea, which reproduces by tearing itself into a head and a tail which subsequently regenerate the missing body parts, creates diversity. These data include whole genome sequencing of some individuals from a years-long longitudinal study of population growth across different planarian populations, to ask whether genetic diversity exists within and across closely related clonal planarians. Moreover, we provide whole genome sequencing of consecutive head offspring collected over several generations to ask how mutations arise and are distributed during bisection.