articleScienceSep 27, 2007Closed access

Genomic Minimalism in the Early Diverging Intestinal Parasite Giardia lamblia

Marine Biological Laboratory · University of Arizona · +4 more institutions

PubMed
Indexed incrossrefpubmed

Abstract

The genome of the eukaryotic protist Giardia lamblia, an important human intestinal parasite, is compact in structure and content, contains few introns or mitochondrial relics, and has simplified machinery for DNA replication, transcription, RNA processing, and most metabolic pathways. Protein kinases comprise the single largest protein class and reflect Giardia's requirement for a complex signal transduction network for coordinating differentiation. Lateral gene transfer from bacterial and archaeal donors has shaped Giardia's genome, and previously unknown gene families, for example, cysteine-rich structural proteins, have been discovered. Unexpectedly, the genome shows little evidence of heterozygosity,…

No related works found for this paper.