Mitochondrial genome of Leishmania: maxicircle structure and heterogeneity of minicircles

Leishmania, as well as the rest of trypanosomatids, presents a DNA network inside the mitochondrion composed of interlocked DNA circles, the so-called kinetoplast DNA. The kinetoplast DNA contains dozens of maxicircles that encode for mitochondrial rRNAs and subunits of the electron transport chain complexes. Many of the maxicircle transcripts require a post-transcriptional process of edition called RNA editing, which is performed by guide RNAs encoded in the minicircles, the other group of DNA molecules of the kinetoplast. The assemble of maxicircle molecules for Leishmania major, Leishmania braziliensis, Leishmania infantum, Leishmania guyanensis and Leishmania adleri was attained from Illumina sequencing reads.