Abstract
Coming out of the Shell: Building the Molecular Infrastructure for Research on Parasite-Harbouring Snails
Highlights
An article in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases by Adema and colleagues [9] served to highlight the substantial gap in knowledge of aspects of the fundamental molecular biology of molluscs harbouring parasites, as well as the extraordinary opportunities that modern research toolkits, including microarray platforms, RNA interference, and high-throughput sequencing, offer for investigations of snailparasite interactions [9]
Snails were collected from a natural body of water in Muang District, Khon Kaen Province, northeast Thailand (Figure 1); the taxonomic identity of the specimens was confirmed based on characteristic morphological features of the shells [13]; RNA was extracted from whole adult, parasite-free B. siamensis goniomphalos (n = 5), reverse-transcribed to cDNA, adaptor-ligated, and paired-end sequenced on a Genome Analyzer II (Illumina)
A total of 32,026 contigs could be annotated with Gene Ontology terms, according to the categories ‘‘biological process,’’ ‘‘cellular component,’’ and ‘‘molecular function.’’ Approximately 77,000 nonoverlapping protein sequences could be inferred from the transcriptome of B. siamensis goniomphalos via BLASTx alignments with protein sequences available in public databases
Summary
An article in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases by Adema and colleagues [9] served to highlight the substantial gap in knowledge of aspects of the fundamental molecular biology of molluscs harbouring parasites, as well as the extraordinary opportunities that modern research toolkits, including microarray platforms, RNA interference, and high-throughput sequencing, offer for investigations of snailparasite interactions [9]. In order to provide the research community with a solid resource for molecular studies of these organisms, we generated the first reference transcriptome of Bithynia siamensis goniomphalos (Gastropoda, Bithyniidae), the intermediate host of O. viverrini in areas of northeast Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, where the incidence of CCA is highest [cf 10] (cf Figure 1).
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