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Imamura H, Downing T, Van den Broeck F, Sanders MJ, Rijal S, Sundar S, Mannaert A, Vanaerschot M, Berg M, De Muylder G, Dumetz F, Cuypers B, Maes I, Domagalska M, Decuypere S, Rai K, Uranw S, Bhattarai NR, Khanal B, Prajapati VK, Sharma S, Stark O, Schönian G, De Koning HP, Settimo L, Vanhollebeke B, Roy S, Ostyn B, Boelaert M, Maes L, Berriman M, Dujardin JC, Cotton JA. Evolutionary genomics of epidemic visceral leishmaniasis in the Indian subcontinent. eLife 2016; 5. [PMID: 27003289 PMCID: PMC4811772 DOI: 10.7554/elife.12613] [Citation(s) in RCA: 116] [Impact Index Per Article: 14.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/27/2015] [Accepted: 02/15/2016] [Indexed: 12/25/2022] Open
Abstract
Leishmania donovani causes visceral leishmaniasis (VL), the second most deadly vector-borne parasitic disease. A recent epidemic in the Indian subcontinent (ISC) caused up to 80% of global VL and over 30,000 deaths per year. Resistance against antimonial drugs has probably been a contributing factor in the persistence of this epidemic. Here we use whole genome sequences from 204 clinical isolates to track the evolution and epidemiology of L. donovani from the ISC. We identify independent radiations that have emerged since a bottleneck coincident with 1960s DDT spraying campaigns. A genetically distinct population frequently resistant to antimonials has a two base-pair insertion in the aquaglyceroporin gene LdAQP1 that prevents the transport of trivalent antimonials. We find evidence of genetic exchange between ISC populations, and show that the mutation in LdAQP1 has spread by recombination. Our results reveal the complexity of L. donovani evolution in the ISC in response to drug treatment. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12613.001 The parasite Leishmania donovani causes a disease called visceral leishmaniasis that affects many of the world's poorest people. Around half a million new cases develop every year, but health authorities lack safe and effective drugs to treat them. Up to 80% of these cases occur in the Indian subcontinent, where devastating epidemics have occurred in the last decades. One reason these epidemics continue to occur is that the parasites develop genetic mutations allowing them to adapt to and resist the drugs used to kill them. As there are few existing drugs that can kill L. donovani, it is crucial to understand how drug resistance emerges and spreads among parasite populations. Imamura, Downing, Van den Broeck et al. have now investigated the history of visceral leishmaniasis epidemics by characterising the complete genetic sequence – or genome – of 204 L. donovani parasite samples. This revealed that the majority of parasites in the Indian subcontinent first appeared in the nineteenth century, matching the first historical records of visceral leishmaniasis epidemics. The genomes show that most of the parasites are genetically similar and can be clustered into several closely related groups. These groups first appeared in the 1960s following the end of a regional campaign to eradicate malaria. The most common parasite group is particularly resistant to drugs called antimonials, which were the main treatment for leishmaniasis until recently. These parasites have a small genetic change that scrambles most of a protein known to be involved in the uptake of antimonials. Parasites may also be able to develop resistance to drugs through additional mechanisms that allow them to produce many copies of the same gene. These mechanisms could allow the parasites to rapidly adapt to new drugs or changes in the populations it infects. The work of Imamura et al. looks only at parasites isolated from patients then grown in the laboratory, so further research is now needed to explore how variable the Leishmania genome is in both of the parasite’s hosts: humans and sandflies. Imamura et al.’s study reveals how L. donovani has spread throughout the Indian subcontinent in fine detail. The genome data can be used to create simple molecular tools that could form an "early warning system" to track the success of disease control programs and to determine how well the current drugs are working. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12613.002
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Affiliation(s)
- Hideo Imamura
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Tim Downing
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom.,School of Maths, Applied Maths and Statistics, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland
| | | | | | - Suman Rijal
- BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, Nepal
| | - Shyam Sundar
- Department of Medicine, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
| | - An Mannaert
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Manu Vanaerschot
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Maya Berg
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Géraldine De Muylder
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Franck Dumetz
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Bart Cuypers
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Ilse Maes
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | | | - Saskia Decuypere
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium.,Telethon Kids Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
| | - Keshav Rai
- BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, Nepal
| | | | | | | | - Vijay Kumar Prajapati
- Department of Medicine, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
| | - Smriti Sharma
- Department of Medicine, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
| | - Olivia Stark
- Institut für Mikrobiologie und Hygiene, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| | - Gabriele Schönian
- Institut für Mikrobiologie und Hygiene, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| | - Harry P De Koning
- Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom
| | - Luca Settimo
- Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.,Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, United States
| | - Benoit Vanhollebeke
- Laboratory of Molecular Parasitology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Gosselies, Belgium
| | - Syamal Roy
- Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata, India
| | - Bart Ostyn
- Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Marleen Boelaert
- Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Louis Maes
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
| | | | - Jean-Claude Dujardin
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium.,Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - James A Cotton
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom
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Dujardin JC, Mannaert A, Durrant C, Cotton JA. Mosaic aneuploidy in Leishmania: the perspective of whole genome sequencing. Trends Parasitol 2014; 30:554-5. [PMID: 25458156 DOI: 10.1016/j.pt.2014.09.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/21/2014] [Revised: 09/23/2014] [Accepted: 09/25/2014] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Jean-Claude Dujardin
- Unit of Molecular Parasitology, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium; Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
| | - An Mannaert
- Unit of Molecular Parasitology, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium
| | - Caroline Durrant
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton CB10 1SA, UK
| | - James A Cotton
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton CB10 1SA, UK
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Mannaert A, Amemiya CT, Bossuyt F. Comparative analyses of vertebrate posterior HoxD clusters reveal atypical cluster architecture in the caecilian Typhlonectes natans. BMC Genomics 2010; 11:658. [PMID: 21106068 PMCID: PMC3091776 DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-11-658] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/11/2010] [Accepted: 11/24/2010] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND The posterior genes of the HoxD cluster play a crucial role in the patterning of the tetrapod limb. This region is under the control of a global, long-range enhancer that is present in all vertebrates. Variation in limb types, as is the case in amphibians, can probably not only be attributed to variation in Hox genes, but is likely to be the product of differences in gene regulation. With a collection of vertebrate genome sequences available today, we used a comparative genomics approach to study the posterior HoxD cluster of amphibians. A frog and a caecilian were included in the study to compare coding sequences as well as to determine the gain and loss of putative regulatory sequences. RESULTS We sequenced the posterior end of the HoxD cluster of a caecilian and performed comparative analyses of this region using HoxD clusters of other vertebrates. We determined the presence of conserved non-coding sequences and traced gains and losses of these footprints during vertebrate evolution, with particular focus on amphibians. We found that the caecilian HoxD cluster is almost three times larger than its mammalian counterpart. This enlargement is accompanied with the loss of one gene and the accumulation of repeats in that area. A similar phenomenon was observed in the coelacanth, where a different gene was lost and expansion of the area where the gene was lost has occurred. At least one phylogenetic footprint present in all vertebrates was lost in amphibians. This conserved region is a known regulatory element and functions as a boundary element in neural tissue to prevent expression of Hoxd genes. CONCLUSION The posterior part of the HoxD cluster of Typhlonectes natans is among the largest known today. The loss of Hoxd-12 and the expansion of the intergenic region may exert an influence on the limb enhancer, by having to bypass a distance seven times that of regular HoxD clusters. Whether or not there is a correlation with the loss of limbs remains to be investigated. These results, together with data on other vertebrates show that the tetrapod Hox clusters are more variable than previously thought.
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Affiliation(s)
- An Mannaert
- Biology Department, ECOL, Amphibian Evolution Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
| | - Chris T Amemiya
- Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason and University of Washington, Seattle, USA
| | - Franky Bossuyt
- Biology Department, ECOL, Amphibian Evolution Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
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Mannaert A, Roelants K, Bossuyt F, Leyns L. A PCR survey for posterior Hox genes in amphibians. Mol Phylogenet Evol 2006; 38:449-58. [PMID: 16198128 DOI: 10.1016/j.ympev.2005.08.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/28/2005] [Revised: 08/22/2005] [Accepted: 08/23/2005] [Indexed: 10/25/2022]
Abstract
Hox genes encode transcription factors that play a key role in specifying the body plan in metazoans and are therefore essential in explaining patterns of evolutionary diversity. As an ancient tetrapod group with diverse limb types, amphibians are important for understanding the origin and diversification of limbs in land vertebrates. We conducted a PCR survey in two species of each amphibian order to identify Hox-9 to Hox-13, known to function in limb development. Fifteen distinct posterior Hox genes and one retro-pseudogene were identified, and the former confirm the existence of four Hox clusters in each amphibian order. Some genes expected to occur in all tetrapods, based on the posterior Hox complement of mammals, fishes and coelacanth, were not recovered from our survey, and may have been lost. Hoxd-12 is absent in frogs and possibly other amphibians. Considering its function in autopodial development, the loss of this gene may be related to the absence of the fifth finger in frogs and salamanders.
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Affiliation(s)
- An Mannaert
- Department of Biology, Unit of Ecology and Systematics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
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