Evidence for repeated gene duplications in Tritrichomonas foetus supported by EST analysis and comparison with the Trichomonas vaginalis genome

OYHENART J; BRECCIA JD

VETERINARY PARASITOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2014 vol. 206 p. 267 - 276

0304-4017

Tritrichomonas foetus causes a venereal infection in cattle; the disease has mild or no clinicalmanifestation in bulls, while cows may present vaginitis, placentitis, pyometra and abortionin the more severe cases. T. foetus has one of the largest known genomes among trichomon-ads. However molecular data are fragmentary and have minimally contributed to theunderstanding of the biology and pathogenesis of this protozoan. In a search of new T. foetusgenes, a detailed exploration was performed using recently available expressed sequences.Genes involved in the central carbon metabolism (phosphoenol pyruvate carboxykinase,glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase, thiore-doxin peroxidase, alpha and beta chains of succinyl CoA synthetase, malate dehydrogenase,malate oxidoreductase and enolase) as well as in cell structure and motility (actin, -tubulinand -tubulin) were found duplicated and, in many cases, repeatedly duplicated. Homologyanalysis suggested that massive expansions might have occurred in the T. foetus genomein a similar way it was also predicted for Trichomonas vaginalis, while conservation assess-ment showed that duplications have been acquired after differentiation of the two species.Therefore, gene duplications might be common among these parasitic protozoans.