Generation and analysis of expressed sequence tags from Trypanosoma cruzi trypomastigote and amastigote cDNA libraries.

We have generated 2771 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from two cDNA libraries of Trypanosoma cruzi CL-Brener. The libraries were constructed from trypomastigote and amastigotes, using a spliced leader primer to synthesize the cDNA second strand, thus selecting for full-length cDNAs. Since the libraries were not normalized nor pre-screened, we compared the representation of transcripts between the two using a statistical test and identify a subset of transcripts that show apparent differential representation. A non-redundant set of 1619 reconstructed transcripts was generated by sequence clustering. This dataset was used to perform similarity searches against protein and nucleotide databases. Based on these searches, 339 sequences could be assigned a putative identity. One thousand one-hundred and sixteen sequences in the non-redundant clustered dataset (68.8%) are new expression tags, not represented in the T. cruzi epimastigote ESTs that are in the public databases. Additional information is provided online at http://genoma.unsam.edu.ar/projects/tram. To the best of our knowledge these are the first ESTs reported for the life cycle stages of T. cruzi that occur in the vertebrate host.