Authors
M Shafie2; B Bolt1; K Howe1; J Lomax2; P Kersey1; M Berriman2; 1 European Bioinformatics Institute; 2 Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Discussion
Parasitic worms (helminths) infect approximately one billion humans living in poverty, sometimes with extremely dire consequences to their health. They also have a direct impact on global food security through the infection of livestock. In order to fight against helminth infections, an integrated approach to collect, curate and present helminth genomic and transcriptomic data is needed.
More than a hundred helminth genomes are now hosted on our portal, WormBase ParaSite. All these genomes benefit from our automatic curation pipeline, which allows prediction of protein domains and functions (through Interpro Scan and projection of Gene Ontology terms). Transcriptomic data is also displayed through customizable tracks.
Genomic and transcriptomic data can be directly accessed by searching or browsing our website, downloaded from our FTP server, or can be accessed by scripts using our programming interface. Many tools are available for genome analysis, including sequence searches, a data mining platform and a tool for displaying on a reference sequence the effect of uploaded polymorphisms.