Defining species specific genome differences in malaria parasites

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Guangan Hu¹  Preiser R Peter¹  Kingsley JL Liew¹  Zbynek Bozdech¹ 

[1] Division of Genomics and Genetics, School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 60 Nanyang Drive, 637551, Singapore, Singapore;

关键词: Malaria;    Malaria Parasite;    Comparative Genomic Hybridization;    Plasmodium Species;    Antigenic Variation;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-11-128

 received in 2009-07-10, accepted in 2010-02-23,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn recent years a number of genome sequences for different plasmodium species have become available. This has allowed the identification of numerous conserved genes across the different species and has significantly enhanced our understanding of parasite biology. In contrast little is known about species specific differences between the different genomes partly due to the lower sequence coverage and therefore relatively poor annotation of some of the draft genomes particularly the rodent malarias parasite species.ResultsTo improve the current annotation and gene identification status of the draft genomes of P. berghei, P. chabaudi and P. yoelii, we performed genome-wide comparisons between these three species. Through analyses via comparative genome hybridizations using a newly designed pan-rodent array as well as in depth bioinformatics analysis, we were able to improve on the coverage of the draft rodent parasite genomes by detecting orthologous genes between these related rodent parasite species. More than 1,000 orthologs for P. yoelii were now newly associated with a P. falciparum gene. In addition to extending the current core gene set for all plasmodium species this analysis also for the first time identifies a relatively small number of genes that are unique to the primate malaria parasites while a larger gene set is uniquely conserved amongst the rodent malaria parasites.ConclusionsThese findings allow a more thorough investigation of the genes that are important for host specificity in malaria.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Liew et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.