Dracunculus medinensis

BioProject PRJEB500 | Data Source Wellcome Sanger Institute | Taxonomy ID 318479

About Dracunculus medinensis

The nematode Dracunculus medinensis causes dracunculiasis, or Guinea Worm Disease (GWD) in remote areas of Africa without access to safe drinking water. Humans acquire the parasite when they drink water containing copepods infected with D. medinensis larvae. Nearly eradicated as a result of the Guinea Worm Eradication Programme, which reduced 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 148 cases in 2013, GWD has reemerged in Chad in 2010 after an absence of 2 years.

Genome Assembly & Annotation

Assembly

The draft genome assembly was produced by the Parasite Genomic group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in collaboration with Mark Eberhard (CDC, USA) as part of the 50 Helminth Genomes project. The assembly uses Illumina paired-end sequencing followed by an in-house genome assembly pipeline comprising various steps, including contig assembly, scaffolding, gap-filling and error-correction.

Annotation

The gene predictions were made by the Parasite Genomics group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and WormBase, as part of the 50 Helminth Genomes project. An in-house pipeline was developed that used MAKER to generate high-quality annotations by integrating evidence from multiple sources: ab initio gene predictions from AUGUSTUS, GeneMark-ES, and SNAP; projected annotation from C. elegans (using GenBlastG) and the taxonomically nearest reference helminth genome (using RATT); and ESTs, mRNAs and proteins from related organisms aligned to the genome using BLAST, with refinement of alignments using Exonerate.

Key Publications

Assembly Statistics

AssemblyD_medinensis_Ghana_v2_0_4, GCA_000946415.1
Database VersionWBPS18
Genome Size103,750,625
Data SourceWellcome Sanger Institute
Annotation Version2014-06-50HGPpatch

Gene counts

Coding genes10,969
Gene transcripts10,969

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