Mosaic aneuploidy in Leishmania: the perspective of whole genome sequencing

In their recent opinion paper [1], Sterkers et al. review findings on intra-strain mosaic aneuploidy in Leishmania and present a challenging model predicting the consequences of this phenomenon for the genetic diversity observed within a given strain: this model leads to a loss of heterozygosity in clonal division, and to a gain of heterozygosity in automixy. They review results largely based on an elegant fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) that measured, at individual cell level, the somy of individual chromosomes within five laboratory strains from five different species propagated in vitro as promastigotes.