THE HYPERVARIABLE REGIONS OF kDNA MINICIRCLES IN THE 6 MAIN LINEAGES OF Trypanosoma cruzi: A NEXT GENERATION SEQUENCING APPROACH

FANNY RUSMAN; NICOLAS TOMASINI; NOELIA FLORIDIA; PAULA G. RAGONE; PATRICIO DIOSQUE

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXIX REUNION ANUAL DE LA SOCIEDAD ARGENTINA DE PROTOZOOLOGIA; 2018

The kDNA network (the mitochondrial DNA in trypanosomatids) consists of thousands of interlocked DNA rings of two types, maxicircles (that encodes typical mitochondrial gene products) and minicircles. Each minicircle is organized into four conserved regions (¡Ö 120 bp) located 90¡ãapart and intercalated by an equal number of hypervariable regions (¡Ö 240 bp) known as mHVR. Up to date, a few mHVR sequences were obtained, possibly due to technical issues in sequencing these regions. Nowadays, new techniques such as Next Generation Sequencing provide us the opportunity to gain a deeper knowledge of mHVR diversity.The aim of the present work is to describe an original approach for the study of mHVR sequence diversity in the six main linages of T. cruzi by using an amplicon sequencing strategy. We expect these results may contribute to the improvement of present diagnosis methods and permit a lineage-specific determination.