Trypanosoma brucei Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Trypanosoma brucei

Trypanosoma brucei is a species of parasitic kinetoplastid belonging to the genus Trypanosoma that is present in sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike other protozoan parasites that normally infect blood and tissue cells, it is exclusively extracellular and inhabits the blood plasma and body fluids. It causes deadly vector-borne diseases: African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness in humans, and animal trypanosomiasis or nagana in cattle and horses. It is a species complex grouped into three subspecies: T. b. brucei, T. b. gambiense and T. b. rhodesiense. The first is a parasite of non-human mammals and causes nagana, while the latter two are zoonotic infecting both humans and animals and cause African trypanosomiasis.

Picture credit: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (Image source) Taxonomy ID 185431

(Text from Wikipedia.)

More information General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia

Assembly

T. brucei nuclear genome and the mitochondrial (kinetoplast) together have an estimated size of 35Mb/haploid genome. The T. brucei genome contains a ~0.5Mb segmental duplication affecting chromosomes 4 and 8, which is responsible for some 75 gene duplicates unique to this species. The assembly is also available from the EMBL/Genbank/DDBJ databases under the accession GCA_000209005.1.

Annotation

Annotation of the T. brucei brucei genome has been derived from annotation submitted to the EMBL/Genbank/DDBJ databases; and enhanced by importing data from additional sources, principally UniProtKB and GOA.

References

1. The genome of the African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei.
   Berriman M, Ghedin E, Hertz-Fowler C, Blandin G, Renauld H, Bartholomeu DC, Lennard NJ, Caler E, Hamlin NE, Haas B et al. 2005. Science. 309:416-422.

Picture credit: Image courtesy of Dr. Sophie May, Prof. Laurence Tetley and Dr. Tansy Hammarton from Wellcome Trust Centre For Molecular Parasitology

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.