Pneumocystis carinii is an extracellular lung pathogen, which causes pneumonia in immunocompromised hosts. It is recognised as a major infection of patients with HIV and individuals undergoing organ transplantation, chemotherapy or those with congenital deficiencies.

Although P. carinii is classified as a fungus, it is insensitive to standard antifungal agents. It is also unusual in that antigenic switching of the major surface glycoprotein(MSG) has been demonstrated.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has sequenced 10 cosmid clones. Of these cosmids, 2 contained telomeric DNA and 8 sub-telomeric DNA. These regions are known to be important for MSG gene switching in P. carinii. This project was being carried out in collaboration with Professor Ann Wakefield, Dr. Edward Louis at the University of Oxford, Department of Biochemistry and Dr. J.R. Stringer at the Department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology, University of Cincinnati.

Access the Pneumocystis carinii Sequence data

Access to preliminary unfinished sequence is provided. See our data release policy for more details. At present the sequence has not yet been assembled into contigs and the data consists of single reads only.

Searching the Pneumocystis carinii Sequence data online

A BLAST server is available to allow easy searching of the Pneumocystis carinii sequence.