146 stars in plus several hundred M-Type stars on the upper giant branch in both galaxies. This large number of identified AGB stars motivated a search for long-period variables in these stellar systems. An interesting aspect was if the different metallicities and SFHs would be reflected in the PLRs of the LPVs in the two galaxies.

The main aim of this work was to identify LPVs in and . In Sect.\[variables\] we present a catalogue of red giant variables, the outcome of a photometric monitoring in the $i$-band. The results of this study are summarised in Sect. \[results\].

Observations
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Photometric monitoring
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We obtained multi-epoch observations in the $Gunn$-$i$-band with the $2.56$m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT). The target galaxies were observed on 38 nights in service mode between October 2003 and February 2006 with the Andalucia Faint Object Spectrograph Camera (ALFOSC). It has a pixel scale of 0.19arcsec/pixel resulting in a FOV of approximately $6.4 \times 6.4$arcmin. At every epoch we obtained a single image pointing towards the centre of each galaxy. Our field covered a region corresponding to approximately one scale length derived from the stellar density distribution of (Battinelli & Demers [@batti_b]) and (Battinelli & Demers [@batti_a]), 