Leishmania amazonensis strain:PH8 | isolate:Promastigote cultures Genome sequencing and assembly

Leishmania amazonensis is one of the etiological agents of cutaneous leishmaniasis, a disease that has 21,000 cases/year in Brazil. Different parasite molecules have been studied, as they play a crucial role in establishing the infection in the mammalian host. To understand the role of these virulence factors, it is important to obtain a fully assembled and fully annotated genome of different parasite strains. Once you have your genome complete, you can perform gene manipulation using the highly efficient CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Despite having been described in 2013, the genome of L. amazonensis has not yet been fully assembled and annotated. Thus, our main objective was to obtain and characterize the complete genome sequence of the PH8 strain of L. amazonensis, perform in silico analyzes of the main virulence factors involved in the parasite-host interaction and test CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing protocols.