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Letter

Sequencing and analysis of chromosome 1 of Eimeria tenella reveals a unique segmental organization

¹ Malaysia Genome Institute, UKM-MTDC Smart Technology Centre, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor DE, Malaysia; ² Molecular Genetics Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia; ³ The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire CB10 1SA, United Kingdom; ⁴ Division of Microbiology, Institute for Animal Health, Compton Laboratory, Compton, Near Newbury, Berkshire, RG20 7NN, United Kingdom; ⁵ School of Biosciences and Biotechnology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor DE, Malaysia; ⁶ Departamento de Parasitologia, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo SP, 05508-000, Brazil; ⁷ MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2QH, United Kingdom; ⁸ Departamento de Ciências da Computação, Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo SP, 05508-000, Brazil; ⁹ Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia

Eimeria tenella is an intracellular protozoan parasite that infects the intestinal tracts of domestic fowl and causes coccidiosis, a serious and sometimes lethal enteritis. Eimeria falls in the same phylum (Apicomplexa) as several human and animal parasites such as Cryptosporidium, Toxoplasma, and the malaria parasite, Plasmodium. Here we report the sequencing and analysis of the first chromosome of E. tenella, a chromosome believed to carry loci associated with drug resistance and known to differ between virulent and attenuated strains of the parasite. The chromosome—which appears to be representative of the genome—is gene-dense and rich in simple-sequence repeats, many of which appear to give rise to repetitive amino acid tracts in the predicted proteins. Most striking is the segmentation of the chromosome into repeat-rich regions peppered with transposon-like elements and telomere-like repeats, alternating with repeat-free regions. Predicted genes differ in character between the two types of segment, and the repeat-rich regions appear to be associated with strain-to-strain variation.

¹¹ These authors contributed equally to this work.

¹² Corresponding author.

E-mail phd@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk; fax 44-1-223-412-178.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org. Software is available at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/happy/HappyGroup/happyhomepage.html. The sequence data from this study have been submitted to EMBL under accession no. AM269894.]

Article published online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.5823007

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