The Genome Sequence of the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae

Abstract

Anopheles gambiae is the principal vector of malaria, a disease that afflicts more than 500 million people and causes more than 1 million deaths each year. Tenfold shotgun sequence coverage was obtained from the PEST strain of A. gambiae and assembled into scaffolds that span 278 million base pairs. A total of 91% of the genome was organized in 303 scaffolds; the largest scaffold was 23.1 million base pairs. There was substantial genetic variation within this strain, and the apparent existence of two haplotypes of approximately equal frequency (“dual haplotypes”) in a substantial fraction of the genome likely reflects the outbred nature of the PEST strain. The sequence produced a conservative inference of more than 400,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms that showed a markedly bimodal density distribution. Analysis of the genome sequence revealed strong evidence for about 14,000 protein-encoding transcripts. Prominent expansions in specific families of proteins likely involved in cell adhesion and immunity were noted. An expressed sequence tag analysis of genes regulated by blood feeding provided insights into the physiological adaptations of a hematophagous insect.

A heterozygous moth genome provides insights into herbivory and detoxification

“…The predicted proteomes in the DBM genome and those from the genomes of 11 insect species 13,14,[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] and 1 Arachnida outgroup species 72 were used in BLAST (1 × 10 −7 ). The fragmental alignments of HSPs were joined using Solar 36 .…”

Cloning and characterization of 60S ribosomal protein L22 (RPL22) from Culex pipiens pallens

“…The phylogenic tree was constructed by the neighbor-joining method using the MEGA 3.1 program. The sequences of RPL22 included in our analysis were from Culex quinquefasciatus, Aedes aegypti (Nene et al, 2007), Anopheles gambiae (Holt et al, 2002), Drosophila melanogaster (Koyama et al, 1999), Drosophila ananassae (Clark et al, 2007), Cotesia congregate (Bezier et al, 2008), Xenopus tropicalis (Klein et al, 2002), Spodoptera frugiperda (Landais et al, 2003), and Bombyx mori.…”

Are Caenorhabditis elegans receptors useful targets for drug discovery: Pharmacological comparison of tyramine receptors with high identity from C. elegans (TYRA-2) and Brugia malayi (Bm4)

“…The G-protein coupling of 18 of the 34 receptors is known or strongly suggested through experimentation [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. An unrooted phylogenetic tree of annotated TA/OA receptors using maximal parsimony was compiled using PAUP (Figure 2).…”