Rhodnius prolixus (Kissing bug, CDC) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Rhodnius prolixus

Rhodnius prolixus is a triatomine vector of the Chagas disease parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, in South and Central America. Chagas disease is a chronic condition which affects 8 to 10 million people and is the cause of around 20,000 deaths per year. Triatomine insects release parasites in their faeces immediately after a blood meal. Infection occurs after the human host scratches the bite area, thus transferring parasites into the bite wound.

Picture credit (public domain): Dr. Erwin Huebner 2009

Strain CDC
The Rhodnius prolixus CDC strain from the colony at the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia, Atlanta was used as the source for DNA. The original insects were collected by Charles B. Beard in Colombia (domestic dwelling/environment) and have been kept at the CDC for over 15 years.

Assembly

Rhodnius prolixus was sequenced by the Washington University School of Medicine, Genome Sequencing Center (WUGSC) to a depth of 8.1x coverage, and assembled using the CABOG assembler. DNA was isolated from the colony at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA. WGS sequence was released to GenBank in April 2015: ACPB00000000.3. This assembly version RproC3, also known as Rhodnius_prolixus-3.0.3, is composed of 16,537 supercontigs.

Annotation

The annotation of the Rhodnius prolixus genome has been conducted by VectorBase. Genes were predicted using the Ensembl pipeline, which combines the results from ab initio predictions from Genscan and SNAP, alignments of dipteran and other protein sets, and R. prolixus ESTs. The geneset presented here (RproC3.4, July 2019) includes annotation by the Rhodnius community to improve and validate gene models and non-coding RNA genes from the Ensembl Genomes pipeline.

References

1. Genetics and evolution of triatomines: from phylogeny to vector control.
   Gourbire S, Dorn P, Tripet F, Dumonteil E. 2012. Heredity. 108:190-202.
2. The case for sequencing the genome of the blood-feeding hemipteran insect, Rhodnius prolixus.
   Huebner E, O'Donnell M, Lowenberger C, Steel C, Orchard I, Levin M, Garcia B, Esteban H, Oscar SD, Morales MM et al.. VectorBase: Genome project white paper.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.