The disease

The Leishmania parasite is an intracellular pathogen of the immune system targeting macrophages and dendritic cells. The disease Leishmaniasis affects the populations of 88 counties worldwide with symptoms ranging from disfiguring cutaneous and muco-cutaneous lesions that can cause widespread destruction of mucous membranes to visceral disease affecting the haemopoetic organs.

Leishmania braziliensisis the third Leishmania species to be sequenced at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Unlike previous species sequenced, it is a New World pathogen that is endemic throughout South America. As well as causing localised cutaneous lesions in affected people, Leishmania braziliensis can also result in a more destructive, progressive infection in mucosal tissue in a proportion of patients. This can lead to chronic destruction of the nasel septum and soft palate. Karyotyping of Leishmania braziliensis has shown that it has 35 chromosomes compared to the 36 present in old world species. The difference in chromosome number is due to the fusion of chromosomes 20 and 34 to make a single chromosome in Leishmania braziliensis.

The project

We have generated a whole genome shutgun, to approximately 5x coverage, of Leishmania braziliensis clone MHOM/BR/75M2904. This project is a collaboration with Angela Cruz (Universidade de São Paulo - FMRP - USP) and Debbie Smith (Imperial College).

The genome is now published as part of a comparative genome analysis with L. major and L. infantum.

Peacock et al, Nature Genetics, 39 839-847 (2007),
PMID:17572675.

The sequences

All data are available from the ftp site.

The database

All of the Leishmania braziliensis sequence data are available in the GeneDB database together with manual and automatic annotations and predictions.