CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Trypanosoma cruzi is the causal agent of Chagas´disease. Unlike other eukaryotes, the protein-coding genesof T. cruzi are arranged in large polycistronic gene clusters which are transcribed as a single RNA unit. Inthe last decades it was thought that trypanosomes rely solely on posttranscriptional processes to regulategene expression.The High Mobility Group Bs is a family of chromatin proteins, capable of binding non-canonical DNAstructures through one or more domains called ?HMG box?. These proteins are highly conserved amongeukaryotic organisms and they are involved in several nuclear processes including transcription, replication,recombination and DNA repair. In a previous work we identified and characterized a homologous proteinof HMGB in Trypanosoma cruzi, called TcHMGB. Like the HMGB1 from mammals, TcHMGB has twoDNA binding domains ?HMG box?, but it lacks the typical acidic carboxyl terminal sequence. Interestingly,TcHMGB has a unique amino-terminal region restrained only to the trypanosomatid HMGBs, which mayconfer specific properties to these proteins, different from the other family members.We constructed a T. cruzi strain capable of overexpressing TcHMGB after tetracycline induction. We showedthat TcHMGB is capable of binding and modifying the chromatin structure, making it more openor relaxed when overexpressed in epimastigotes. Afterwards, we analyzed if this change in chromatin mayinduce an up- or down-regulation of specific genes expression. For this analysis, we performed an RNA-seqassay using Illumina-MiSeq platform and compared TcHMGB overexpressing parasites with the non-inducedcontrol. The quality of the reads was first evaluated with FastQC program. Adapters and low quality sequences(Q