Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Exploring Parasite Gene Space

Funding allocation for complete genome sequencing has a severe taxonomic bias; nearly half of the completed or draft stage genomes are from vertebrates. The luxury of a full genome sequence is unlikely to be available for the vast majority of organisms, regardless of their importance in terms of evolution, health or ecology. This has lead to the investigation of genomes from an increasing number of species, especially parasites, through generation of expressed sequence tags (ESTs).

Over 300,000 ESTs are available for 36 species of parasitic nematode. The species include whipworm and filarial worms, which currently infect 3 bn people, as well as a large number of plant parasites. We have constructed NEMBASE, a database and analysis suite that integrates these transcriptomes with associated annotation and meta-data http://www.nematodes.org. The system enables comparative transcriptomic analyses across the phylum Nematoda. At present we are focusing upon differences both between and within the parasitic and free-living species. This has led to the discovery of greatly expanded protein families and novel protein domains that will provide possible drug targets for lab verification.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to James Wasmuth.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Wasmuth, J., Schmid, R., Anthony, A. et al. Exploring Parasite Gene Space. BMC Bioinformatics 6 (Suppl 3), P27 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-6-S3-P27

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-6-S3-P27

Keywords