Application of serial analysis of gene expression to the study of the gene expression profile of Leishmania infantum chagasi promastigote.

This study describes the application of the LongSAGE methodology to study the gene expression profile in promastigotes of Leishmania infantum chagasi. A tag library was created using the LongSAGE method and consisted of 14,208 tags of 17 bases. Of these, 8,427 (59.3%) were distinct. BLAST research of the 1,645 most abundant tags showed that 12.8% of them identified the coding sequences of genes, while 82% (1,349/1,645) identified one or more genomic sequences that did not correspond with open reading frames. Only 5.2% (84/1,645) of the tags were not aligned to any position in the L. infantum genome. The UTR size of Leishmania and the lack of CATG sites in some transcripts were decisive for the generation of tags in these regions. Additional analysis will allow a better understanding of the expression profile and discovering the key genes in this life cycle.