Plasmodium knowlesi Assembly and Gene Annotation

About the Plasmodium_knowlesi genome

Plasmodium knowlesi is a parasite of primates, especially long-tailed macaques. It's genome contains a large gene family that apparently mimics regulators of the human immune system, while genes involved in antigenic variation (used to variably coat paratisized red blood cells to confuse the host defence system) are clustered on the tips of chromosomes, unlike other species of Plasmodia. The size of the genome is 2.3 Mb, GC content is around 40%, and the gene count is approximately 5000; this are similar values to those of the Plasmodium vivax genome, but different from the genome of Plasmodium falciparum which has a lower GC content; while more genes have been predicted in Plasmodium yoelli yoelii.

Annotation

Annotation for the Plasmodium_knowlesi genomes has been derived from annotation submitted to the EMBL/Genbank/DDBJ databases; and enhanced by importing data from additional sources, principally UniProtKB and GOA. Non coding RNA genes have been annotated using tRNAScan-SE (Lowe, T.M. and Eddy, S.R. 1997) , RFAM (Griffiths-Jones et al 2005), and RNAmmer (Lagesen K.,et al 2007); additional analysis tools have also been applied.

References

1. The genome of the simian and human malaria parasite Plasmodium knowlesi.
   Pain A, Bhme U, Berry AE, Mungall K, Finn RD, Jackson AP, Mourier T, Mistry J, Pasini EM, Aslett MA et al. 2008. Nature. 455:799-803.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.