Proteomic diversity in a prevalent human-infective Giardia duodenalis sub-species

Giardia duodenalis a species complex of gastrointestinal protists, with assemblages A and B infective to humans. To date, post-genomic proteomics are largely derived from Assemblage A, biasing understanding of parasite biology. To address this gap, we quantitatively analysed the proteomes of trophozoites from the genome reference and two clinical Assemblage B isolates, revealing lower spectrum-to-peptide matches in non-reference isolates, resulting in significant losses in peptide and protein identifications, and indicating significant intra-assemblage variation. We also explored differential protein expression between in vitro cultured subpopulations putatively enriched for dividing and feeding cells, respectively. This data is an important proteomic baseline for Assemblage B, highlighting proteomic differences between physiological states, and unique differences relative to Assemblage A.