Needles in the EST Haystack: Large-Scale Identification and Analysis of Excretory-Secretory (ES) Proteins in Parasitic Nematodes Using Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs)
2008

Identifying Excretory-Secretory Proteins in Parasitic Nematodes

Sample size: 4710 publication 10 minutes Evidence: high

Author Information

Author(s): Nagaraj Shivashankar H., Gasser Robin B., Ranganathan Shoba

Primary Institution: Macquarie University

Hypothesis

Can we identify and analyze excretory-secretory proteins from parasitic nematodes using expressed sequence tags?

Conclusion

The study successfully identified 4,710 excretory-secretory proteins from 39 species of parasitic nematodes, providing a foundation for future drug and vaccine development.

Supporting Evidence

  • 4,710 excretory-secretory proteins were predicted from 452,134 expressed sequence tags.
  • 52.8% of the identified proteins had homologues in Caenorhabditis elegans.
  • 267 homologues were associated with strong loss-of-function phenotypes in C. elegans.

Takeaway

Scientists found a lot of important proteins from worms that can help us make new medicines or vaccines to fight diseases caused by these worms.

Methodology

The study used a computational workflow called EST2Secretome to analyze expressed sequence tags from parasitic nematodes.

Limitations

Some sequences were of low quality and could not be assigned any function.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1371/journal.pntd.0000301

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