Ablation of LmKu80 activates alternative lengthening of telomeres in Leishmania mexicana

The study investigates the impact on telomere maintenance in L. mexicana through knockout mutants of Ku80 and TERT, as well as a double-knockout of both genes. To provide insights into the behavior of telomeres we employed long-read nanopore sequencing for the analysis of chromosome arm-specific telomere reads.