Hannover Babesia Genomes

We sequenced the genomes of four Babesia isolates from Central Europe, two Babesia divergens (Hullmann and Holland) and two Babesia microti (HM112 and HM113), and herein are the protein sets from the annotated genomes in FASTA format. When these genomes were compared, species/isolate-specific genes were obtained, and we speculated that they could be responsible for the differences in pathogenesis known between B. microti and B. divergens.

We further compared the new B. microti genomes (the first complete genome of any European B. microti) with the RI reference strain, and differences in genes between these European B. microti isolates and RI, originally from the USA, were speculated to be responsible for the difference in pathogenicity of B. microti between North America and Europe.

At different levels of investigation, variant erythrocyte surface antigen 1 (VESA1) genes featured prominently, and so we concluded that they could be the main explanation for the differences in pathogenicity known between European B. divergens and B. microti parasites.