Chagas disease or American trypanosomiasis is a potentially deadly disease caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. This parasite is spread to people and animals by the feces of insects from the Triatominae subfamily, also known as kissing bugs. Chagas disease affects about 10 million people worldwide, and approximately 10,000 people die from it annually. See this recently published Chagas disease overview from the Texas Chagas Task Force for more information!
Today, we upgrade the genome of Rhodnius prolixus, a major vector of Chagas disease. This work was based on the draft published by (Mesquita, Vionette-Amaral et al., PNAS, 2015), and relied on a sample from BEI Resources to generate the necessary Hi-C data. The chromosome-length assembly is shared here.
Very little is currently known about R. prolixus chromosomes, but what there is in the literature is in agreement with the new chromosome-length genome assembly. For example, prior research suggests that R. prolixus has a 2n=22 karyotype (see contact map below for the immediate validation of the chromosome number in a haploid assembly) and an XY sex determination system [1, 2, 3].
Note that in organisms with an XY sex determination system (and those in which X and Y are sufficiently diverged) one expects the X chromosome to have half the coverage of autosomes in male samples (for example, this is true of mammalian samples). Indeed, this is what we see when visualizing the Hi-C contact map from a male sample, below!
