Mitochondrial genomics of human pathogenic parasite Leishmania (Viannia) panamensis

Daniel Alfonso Urrea; Omar Triana-Chavez; Juan F Alzate

doi:10.7717/peerj.7235

Mitochondrial genomics of human pathogenic parasite Leishmania (Viannia) panamensis

PeerJ. 2019 Jul 2:7:e7235. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7235. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Daniel Alfonso Urrea^{1

2}, Omar Triana-Chavez², Juan F Alzate³

Affiliations

¹ Laboratorio de Investigaciones en Parasitología Tropical (LIPT), Departamento de Biología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad del Tolima, Ibague, Tolima, Colombia.
² Grupo Biología y Control de Enfermedades Infecciosas (BCEI), Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia.
³ Centro Nacional de Secuenciación Genómica -CNSG, Sede de Investigación Universitaria -SIU. Grupo de Parasitología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia.

Abstract

Background: The human parasite Leishmania (V.) panamensis is one of the pathogenic species responsible for cutaneous leishmaniasis in Central and South America. Despite its importance in molecular parasitology, its mitochondrial genome, divided into minicircles and maxicircles, haven't been described so far.

Methods: Using NGS-based sequencing (454 and ILLUMINA), and combining de novo genome assembly and mapping strategies, we report the maxicircle kDNA annotated genome of L. (V.) panamensis, the first reference of this molecule for the subgenus Viannia. A comparative genomics approach is performed against other Leishmania and Trypanosoma species.

Results: The results show synteny of mitochondrial genes of L. (V.) panamensis with other kinetoplastids. It was also possible to identify nucleotide variants within the coding regions of the maxicircle, shared among some of them and others specific to each strain. Furthermore, we compared the minicircles kDNA sequences of two strains and the results show that the conserved and divergent regions of the minicircles exhibit strain-specific associations.

Keywords: Comparative genomics; Genomics; Leishmania panamensis; Mitochondria; Mitogenome; Ngs.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Colciencias grant 11551929249, Universidad de Antioquia UdeA, and by a Ph.D. Studentship funded by Colciencias. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.