Project

The Spaeth team demonstrated that the toxic gene dosage effects in Leishmania (such as spontaneous deletion of essential genes) can be compensated by transcriptional reprogramming, which relies on the selective stabilization or degradation of mRNAs, and translational regulation. These recent findings propose a novel model for Leishmania fitness gain, where differential regulation of mRNA stability and the generation of fitness-adapted ribosomes and their associated non-coding RNAs may potentially filter deleterious from beneficial gene dosage effects and provide proteomic robustness to genetically heterogenous, adapting parasite populations. Here we want to compare three different approaches of RNA seq so we can better investigate the ribosomes in Leishmania: 1) poly-A, 2) ribodepletion, and 3) total RNA (not poly-A nor ribodepleted). We have two sets of samples: early culture passage (p2) and late passage (p20). We want to investigate if Leishmania has a ribosome language, that influences translational control in p2 and p20 samples.