**7. Conclusions**

Protozoan parasites are continuously subjected to the effects of antiparasitic drugs and host immune system attacks, which can affect their genome stability and therefore, their survival. In order to maintain the integrity of their DNA molecules, parasites have developed several mechanisms that are efficient to detect and accurately repair damaged nucleotides. Bioinformatic analyses of fully sequenced genomes are useful to identify molecular machineries for DNA repair in protozoan parasites of clinical relevance such as *Entamoeba histolyica*, *Giardia lamblia*, *Plasmodium falciparum* and *Trichomonas vaginalis,*  which have a world-wide distribution with a high prevalence in developing countries. The computational data presented here provide new information on the evolution of DNA repair proteins and their potential relevance for DNA damage response in these major human pathogens. Future directions would include functional assays, as well as protein expression and protein-protein interactions analysis for the most relevant proteins, in order to contribute to the further elucidation of mechanisms regulating genome integrity in these organisms.
