The aim of the project is to create a viewer that will help visualisation and correlation between genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data generated by the comparison of amastigote and promastigote stages of the Leishmania donovani parasite.

Chromosome amplification is commonly used by Leishmania during adaptation to environment.  In this context it is challenging to look for genes relevant for parasite virulence/attenuation/drug resistance... To restrict this chromosomal amplification, a cosmid approach (CoSeq) has been chosen to select for genes that provide fitness gain to  Leishmania donovani parasites in culture and in the animal. Therefore, a cosmid library has been generated with genomic DNA from the parasites which needs to be sequenced to control for genome coverage before transfection to the parasites. The transfected parasites will then be injected to animals or submitted to different culture conditions. Only those transfected with cosmids providing advantage under the studied conditions will be selected and will replicate. These cosmids will be extracted from the parasites and will be sequenced to reveal genes relevant for the parasite survival. The C3Bi would be implicated in the analyses of the sequencing data obtained from the PF1 (retrieve the data, mapping of the reads to Leishmania genome, estimation of the genome coverage, listing of genes selected for a given condition...).

We are generating massive amounts of omics data for Leishmania donovani. Anna Zukhova enabled to use the BiNGO module of Cytoskape to perform and visualize our GO enrichment analyses. We would like to continue our collaboration and ask Anna's help to assess the current state of GO annotation of the Leishmania genome and if possible to complete it using domain searches or ortholog mapping from other genomes, including L. major, T. bruce or model organisms such as yeast. We expect that improvement of GO annotation will also us to better reveal enriched GO terms in our datasets and generate testable hypotheses.

Leishmania genomic adaptation during sand fly infection is only poorly understood. In particular, the possibility of allelic selection in a given parasite population inside the insect vector has not been investigated, even though sexual recombination and the possibly of self-sex (selfing) can change allele frequencies and thus may be relevant for parasite transmission and virulence. We investigate this important open question conducting experimental sand fly infection with bona fide amastigotes isolated from infected hamster spleen, and derived promastigotes with different karyotypic profiles. Applying our genome instability pipeline (GIP) on sand fly-recovered parasites revealed a novel form of Leishmania genome instability inside the insect vector relying on gene conversion, which causes haplotype shuffling and likely allows for the selection of beneficial alleles.