Fig 1. An assembly of genomic sequencing reads from a red colobus blood sample contained significant amounts of sequence from the parasite Hepatocystis spp.

(A) Contigs from the red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) assembly had a bimodal distribution of AT-content and sequence similarity to Plasmodium spp. (B). A phylogenetic tree of cytochrome b indicated that the closest match for the apicomplexan parasite sequenced from red colobus blood is a Hepatocystis isolate from a monkey host. Parasite cytochrome b sequences derived from RNA-seq assemblies from red colobus blood samples are almost entirely identical to the cytochrome b sequence assembled from Hepatocystis DNA reads from a single monkey. Branches of the tree have been coloured by bootstrap support values from 15 (red) to 100 (green). Some bootstrap support values are also shown next to the nodes as text. Red arrows highlight the Hepatocystis samples from the current study. Blue place names indicate the African continent, green Australia, orange Asia.