AUTHOR=Yang Mengquan , Shang Xiaomin , Zhou Yiqing , Wang Changhong , Wei Guiying , Tang Jianxia , Zhang Meihua , Liu Yaobao , Cao Jun , Zhang Qingfeng 

TITLE=Full-Length Transcriptome Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum by Single-Molecule Long-Read Sequencing

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-and-infection-microbiology/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2021.631545

DOI=10.3389/fcimb.2021.631545

ISSN=2235-2988

ABSTRACT=Malaria, an infectious disease caused by Plasmodium parasites, especially Plasmodium falciparum, still caused amounts of deaths every year in last decades. Despite the significance of P. falciparum as a model organism of malaria parasites, our understanding of P. falciparum transcriptome is still limited since lots of progress on transcriptome and genome based on short fragments assembly. Herein, we reported the new version transcripts dataset containing all transcripts in the whole asexual development cycle with the sample mixtures from 6 time points by adopting advanced full-length sequencing approach with improved cDNA library construction method, which is the first report of full-length transcriptome of Plasmodium species. We identified 393 alternative splicing (AS) events, 3,623 long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA), 1,555 alternative polyadenylation (APA) events, 57 transcription factors (TF), 1,721 fusion transcripts in P. falciparum. To validate the full-length transcriptome of P. falciparum, the shotgun proteome was performed and 160 small proteins in lncRNA region were characterized. Collectively, the improved full-length transcriptome dataset with high quality and accuracy of P. falciparum and the shotgun proteome analyses shed light on the complex gene expression in malaria parasites and provide a valuable resource for related malaria research.