Many protozoan parasites represent an important group of human pathogens.
Pulsed Field Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) analysis has been an
important tool for fundamental genetic studies of parasites like
Trypanosoma, Leishmania, Giardia or the human malaria parasite Plasmodium
falciparum. We present PFGE conditions allowing a high resolution
separation of chromosomes ranging from 500 to 4000 kb within a two day
electrophoresis run. In addition, we present conditions for separating
large chromosomes (2000-6000 kb) within 36 hr. We demontrate that the
application of two dimentional PFGE (2D-PFGE) technique to parasite
karyotypes is a very useful method for the analysis of dispersed gene
families and comparative studies of the intrachomosomal genome
organization.
