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.
Severe and life-threatening visceral leishmaniasis is caused by L. donovani species. It is endemic in 62 countries with a total of 200 million cases people at risk, an estimated 0.5 million new cases worldwide each year and 41,000 recorded deaths in 2000. More than 90% of cases occur in Bangladesh, Brazil, India and Sudan. However the number of human cases in Southern Europe has also risen dramatically in recent years due to Leishmania/HIV coinfection. The WHO(TDR) recently carried out an analysis on the burden of disease caused by the 10 most neglected tropical diseases, ones that represent major public health problems in developing countries (see review).
The species of the L. donovani complex are found in different geographical regions. L. donovani is the primary cause of visceral leishmaniasis in the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, L. infantum in the the Mediterranean region and L. chagasi in the New World. While the last two species are genetically identical, all three species are very similar. L. infantum has been chosen as the next Leishmania species to sequence after L. major because it is part of the L. donovani complex and is an adaptable species for experimentation.
The project
We have generated a whole genome shutgun, to ~5x coverage, of L. infantum clone JPCM5 (MCAN/ES/98/LLM-877). This was completed in October 2003. This project is a collaboration with Professor Debbie Smith (Imperial College) and Professor Jeremy Mottram (University of Glasgow).
The genome is now published as part of a comparative genome analysis with L. major and L. braziliensis.
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 infantum sequence data are available in the GeneDB database together with manual and automatic annotations and predictions.
