Nanopore Sequencing Significantly Improves Genome Assembly of the Protozoan Parasite Trypanosoma cruzi.

ABSTRACT: Chagas disease was described by Carlos Chagas, who first identified the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi from a 2-year-old girl called Berenice. Many T. cruzi sequencing projects based on short reads have demonstrated that genome assembly and downstream comparative analyses are extremely challenging in this species, given that half of its genome is composed of repetitive sequences. Here, we report de novo assemblies, annotation, and comparative analyses of the Berenice strain using a combination of Illumina short reads and MinION long reads. Our work demonstrates that Nanopore sequencing improves T. cruzi assembly contiguity and increases the assembly size in ∼16 Mb. Specifically, we found that assembly improvement also refines the completeness of coding regions for both single-copy genes and re

SUBMITTER: Diaz-Viraque F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6640297 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature