Pediculus humanus (Pediculus humanus)

The human body louse, Pediculus humanus corporis is the primary vector of the bacterial agents of louse-borne relapsing fever, trench fever, and epidemic typhus. Epidemic typhus, one of the most significant historical diseases of humans, is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, a category B bioterrorism agent that can cause persistent human infection. Besides its notoriety as the agent of the recurrent chronic disease, trench fever, Bartonella quintana can cause endocarditis and is a common infection among the homeless. Borrelia recurrentis causes another recurrent fever in central and Eastern Africa that is characterized by significant morbidity and mortality. The genome sequences of R. prowazekii and B. quintana have been determined, as well as those of two species of Borrelia, so the body louse genome will enhance studies of host-vector-pathogen interactions.

Assembly

The Pediculus humanus USDA strain genomes sequence was sequenced by the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Assembly of 8.5x shotgun coverage was performed at the JCVI. The assembly presented here (PhumU1, 2007) consists of 1,882 supercontigs totalling 110 Mb with a supercontig N50 of 488 kb.

Annotation

The annotation of the Pediculus genome is a collaboration between VectorBase, JCVI and the University of Geneva. Automated annotation pipelines were run at each centre and the resulting set of predictions merged into a canonical set. A first round of manual appraisal and editing was undertaken by JCVI to improve the quality of the prediction set.

Genome Statistics