Authors

A Bacigalupo¹; C Hernández²; N Ballesteros²; M Muñoz²; JD Ramírez²; KR Elmer¹; MS Llewellyn¹;  ¹ School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow, UK;  ² Centro de Investigaciones en Microbiología y Biotecnología-UR (CIMBIUR), Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia

Discussion

Chagas disease is a chronic infection with the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (Trypanosomatida: Trypanosomatidae), which is transmitted by insect vectors of the subfamily Triatominae (Hemiptera: Reduviidae). American trypanosomiasis continues to be neglected, even among the ‘neglected tropical diseases’, with no reduction in associated disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) during recent years. In this context, seven years after the publication of the first triatomine species whole genome, only two genomes from other triatomines have been released. Our aim is to enable a resurgence of Chagas disease vector research via sequencing, assembly, and annotation of new triatomine vector species: Belminus herreri; Mepraia spinolai; Psammolestes arthuri; Rhodnius brethesi and Rhodnius ecuadoriensis. As first step, we sequenced one R. prolixus individual by long and short reads, assembled its genome, polished, scaffolded, and annotated it, using as reference the previous assemblies and annotations for R. prolixus (GCA_000181055.3; RproC3.5) and Triatoma rubrofasciata (Triatoma_chr_assembly; Triatoma_chr_genome). Our new assembly has 1,270 scaffolds and a N50 of 1,466,963 that includes 18,279 genes coding for 18,328 mRNAs with 93,193 CDSs. The benchmarking universal single copy ortholog (BUSCO) gene completeness of our draft assembly reached 98.4% of the hemiptera_odb10 and 97.8% of the insecta_odb10 databases, which are higher than the 96.6% and 95.1% of the current R. prolixus reference, and the 98.2% and 97.7% of the T. rubrofasciata chromosomal assembly, respectively. We will complement these encouraging results by combining this reference-based annotation with ab initio and transcriptome evidence, and we will follow this procedure for the other triatomine species. These genomes will allow for new research on the genomic basis for adaptation in these vectors. This work was supported by Minciencias Convenio 727 DIeI from UR Colombia; ANID - Programa Becas - Doctorado Becas Chile 2019 72200391; Wellcome [204820/Z/16/Z].