Discussion

Helminths have an enormous global impact on human and animal health, agricultural productivity and economic development. Over the course of a decade, great strides have been made in unravelling the large and complex genomes of helminths, with the genomes of 40 species now published. Genome data provide a huge resource for accelerating the basic and applied research that is urgently need to understand and exploit helminth biology. However, the fragmented nature of draft genome assemblies presents a major challenge for analyses. This problem can be tackled with intensive efforts to drive a handful of genomes to a higher level of accuracy. Alternatively, genomes can be analysed in the context of comparisons between species, where spotting trends is less dependent on each individual sequence. The 50 helminth genomes project has been established to build a comparative genomics dataset that fills the phylogenetic space around existing reference genomes with draft genomes. From these, more than 1 million genes have been predicted. Systematically mining the resource is now our greatest challenge but is already revealing major lineage-specific differences in gene content. As well as providing clues to hallmark characteristics of different helminths, the resource provides new avenues for biological studies and targets for interventions.