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Sequence of Plasmodium falciparum chromosome 12

Nature volume 419, pages 534–537 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

The human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the death of more than a million people every year1. To stimulate basic research on the disease, and to promote the development of effective drugs and vaccines against the parasite, the complete genome of P. falciparum clone 3D7 has been sequenced, using a chromosome-by-chromosome shotgun strategy2,3,4. Here we report the nucleotide sequence of the third largest of the parasite's 14 chromosomes, chromosome 12, which comprises about 10% of the 23-megabase genome. As the most (A + T)-rich (80.6%) genome sequenced to date, the P. falciparum genome presented severe problems during the assembly of primary sequence reads. We discuss the methodology that yielded a finished and fully contiguous sequence for chromosome 12. The biological implications of the sequence data are more thoroughly discussed in an accompanying Article (ref. 3).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the generosity of the participating scientists at Stanford University, TIGR, the WTSI, the NMRC and Oxford University. We also thank N. Hall, M. Berriman, A. Pain and B. Barrell for their time and expertise during the gene-calling annotation process, and are grateful to the members of our Stanford Genome Technology Center for their assistance throughout this project. We thank the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for support that allowed us to participate in the international Malaria Genome Project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford Genome Technology Center, 855 California Avenue, Palo Alto, California, 94304, USA

    Richard W. Hyman, Eula Fung, Aaron Conway, Omar Kurdi, Jennifer Mao, Molly Miranda, Brian Nakao, Don Rowley, Tomoaki Tamaki, Fawn Wang & Ronald W. Davis

  2. Departments of Biochemistry and Genetics, Stanford University Medical College, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    Richard W. Hyman, Eula Fung, Aaron Conway, Omar Kurdi, Jennifer Mao, Molly Miranda, Brian Nakao, Don Rowley, Tomoaki Tamaki, Fawn Wang & Ronald W. Davis

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  1. Richard W. Hyman
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  2. Eula Fung
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Correspondence to Richard W. Hyman.

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Hyman, R., Fung, E., Conway, A. et al. Sequence of Plasmodium falciparum chromosome 12. Nature 419, 534–537 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01102

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