The complete nucleotide sequence of chromosome 3 of Plasmodium falciparum.
Bowman S., Lawson D., Basham D., Brown D., Chillingworth T., Churcher CM., Craig A., Davies RM., Devlin K., Feltwell T., Gentles S., Gwilliam R., Hamlin N., Harris D., Holroyd S., Hornsby T., Horrocks P., Jagels K., Jassal B., Kyes S., McLean J., Moule S., Mungall K., Murphy L., Oliver K., Quail MA., Rajandream MA., Rutter S., Skelton J., Squares R., Squares S., Sulston JE., Whitehead S., Woodward JR., Newbold C., Barrell BG.
Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum chromosome 3, and comparison with chromosome 2, highlights novel features of chromosome organization and gene structure. The sub-telomeric regions of chromosome 3 show a conserved order of features, including repetitive DNA sequences, members of multigene families involved in pathogenesis and antigenic variation, a number of conserved pseudogenes, and several genes of unknown function. A putative centromere has been identified that has a core region of about 2 kilobases with an extremely high (adenine + thymidine) composition and arrays of tandem repeats. We have predicted 215 protein-coding genes and two transfer RNA genes in the 1,060,106-base-pair chromosome sequence. The predicted protein-coding genes can be divided into three main classes: 52.6% are not spliced, 45.1% have a large exon with short additional 5' or 3' exons, and 2.3% have a multiple exon structure more typical of higher eukaryotes.