Genetic analysis of the human infective trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei gambiense: chromosomal segregation, crossing over, and the construction of a genetic map

Anneli Cooper,Lindsay Sweeney,Liam Morrison,Annette Macleod,C Michael R Turner,Alison Tweedie,Andy Tait

doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-6-r103

Anneli Cooper, Lindsay Sweeney + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2008-9-6-r103

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Abstract

A high-resolution genetic linkage map of the STIB 386 strain of Trypanosoma brucei gambiense is presented.

Highlights

Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa, and it has been subdivided into three subspecies: Trypanosoma brucei gambiense and Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, which cause sleeping sickness in humans, and the nonhuman infective Trypanosoma brucei brucei
As an essential and important step toward using this cross to map genes determining traits of importance in the human-infective subspecies of T. brucei, we report the construction of a genetic map of the STIB 386 strain of T. b. gambiense, defining the key features of recombination and providing a comparative analysis with the genetic map of T. b. brucei strain TREU 927
Identification of heterozygous markers and the genotyping of F1 progeny The T. brucei genome sequence from strain TREU 927 had previously been screened using the Tandem Repeat Finder program [33] to identify microsatellites, which were evenly distributed across the genome

Summary

Introduction

Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa, and it has been subdivided into three subspecies: Trypanosoma brucei gambiense and Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, which cause sleeping sickness in humans, and the nonhuman infective Trypanosoma brucei brucei. Genetic maps can be used to establish the order, location, and relative distance of genetic markers in organisms that undergo sexual recombination, as well as to define some of the basic features of recombination Their most important application, is in the identification of loci that. An important feature of the maps of all these organisms is that the physical size of the recombination unit is relatively small, ranging from 17 kilobases (kb) per cM in the case of P. falciparum [1] to 100 to 215 kb in the case of E. tenella and T. gondii [3,4,12] This means that the analysis of relatively few progeny can provide high mapping resolution; this is in contrast to higher eukaryotes, in which the physical size of the recombination unit is usually considerably greater [13]

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