The Project
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Pathogen Sequencing Unit is undertaking partial shotgun sequencing of a number of different species of Plasmodium. This will serve as a useful comparative genomics resource to complement the complete Plasmodium falciparum genome. This work is being done in collaboration with Chris Newbold (Oxford) and Mike Turner (Glasgow).
P. berghei is one of the four malaria species that infect murine rodents from Central Africa that are infectious to laboratory rodents and easily maintained and transmitted by Anopheles stephensi in the laboratory. It serves as a good model for the human parasites with which it shares high homology in most essential aspects of structure, biochemistry and life cycle. Genome organisation is conserved between rodent and human parasites and the two share detailed synteny.
P. berghei has an estimated genome size of 25-27Mb, with 14 chromosomes in the size range of 0.6 Mb to 3.8 Mb. The chromosomes are numbered in ascending order of size, based on the size of chromosomes of the reference clones 8417 and cl15cy1 of the ANKA strain. DNA for this sequencing project was obtained from asynchronous bloodstages of clone 15cy1 of the ANKA strain of P. berghei.
Library construction
Genomic libraries were constructed from P.berghei total genomic DNA provided by Leiden Malaria Research Group in the pUC18 vector. Both ends of the insert have been sequenced to give an eight fold coverage and gaps are being closed.
Project Status
As part of a large scale survey of the Plasmodium lifecyle an initial survey of the P. berghei genome has been published based on analysis of a ~3x partial genome shotgun.
Whole genome shotgun sequencing has continued to 8x coverage. Finishing (gap closure) was started in 2008 and will be followed by a publication of the completed and annotated genome sequence.
The latest 8x assembly sequence data can be downloaded from the FTP site.
Searching the P. berghei genomic sequence online
The P. berghei data is available online through GeneDB.
You can also search against P. berghei genomic sequence using our online BLAST server.
