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

RUSMAN FANNY; TOMASINI NICOLÁS ; FLORIDIA YAPUR NOELIA; RAGONE PAULA GABRIELA; DIOSQUE PATRICIO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Reunión Conjunta de Sociedades de Biociencia; 2017

The kinetoplastic DNA of Trypanosoma cruzi consists of dozensof maxicicles (analogous to the mitochondrial DNA of other eukaryotes)and about 30,000 minicircles. Each minicircle (≈ 1.4 kb) isorganized into four conserved regions (≈ 120 bp) located 90° apartand intercalated by an equal number of hypervariable regions (≈ 240bp) known as mHVR (minicircle hypervariable regions). There arefew known mHVR sequences, possibly due to technical difficultiesfor sequencing this kind of DNA regions in the past. Nowadays, theNext Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques open the possibilityof a deeper knowledge of the mHVR sequence diversity. In thepresent work, we describe our general approach for the study of thediversity of mHVR sequences in the main 6 DTUs of T. cruzi, thegeneration of libraries of these regions and the sequence diversityobtained by NGS. These are the first results in the framework of abroader work that aims to study the diversity of mHVRs and theirevolution, as well as the searching for lineage specific sequences inorder to be used in genetic typing.