The Sanger Institute is involved in a number of projects on tick borne diseases that infect livestock in tropical and sub tropical regions. As well as T. annulata, we are also involved in sequencing genome survey sequencing of Cowdria ruminantium, and EST sequencing of Babesia Bovis. T. annulata is a major cause of livestock disease in sub-tropical regions with greater that 250 million cattle at risk.

Theileria annulata EST Sequencing

Ten thousand reads from a cDNA library from Theileria annulata have being generated with the aim to identify genes involved in pathogenicity, and possible drug targets.. The project was carried out as part of a research program at the Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology of Utrecht University and is supported by the Netherlands Foundation for the advancement of Tropical Research and the Dutch National Organization for Scientific Research.

Theileria annulata Whole Genome Shotgun

The Sanger Institute fully sequenced the genome of T. annulata in a collaborative project with Professor Andy Tait, Professor Brian Shiels at the University of Glasgow and Professor Declan McKeever at the Moredun Research Institute, Edinburgh. T. annulata has a 8.3 megabase genome, comprising of four haploid chromosomes. The intention was to shotgun sequence the whole genome of the Ankara clone C9. The whole genome shotgun was carried out to a 8 x coverage. Shotguns of individual chromosomes was performed to a further 2 x coverage. BAC libraries were also prepared and BAC end sequencing to 10 x coverage was carried out to further aid assembly. Information from the EST project has greatly aided gene identification in the finished sequence.

The genome of Theileria annulata Ankara clone C9 is published in Pain et al, Science 309, 131-133 (2005). See the press release for further details.

Access the Theileria annulata Sequence data

Access to the sequence data is provided through GeneDB.

The sequence is also available from our ftp site .

See our data release policy for more details on how to use and acknowledge our data.

Searching the Theileria annulata Sequence data online

A BLAST server is available to allow easy searching of the Theileria annulata DNA and cDNA sequence.