TABLE CONTENTS

SESSION FORTY – ASSESSING NEW GENOMIC TOOLS
CONVENORS: VALERIE WILLIAMSON & BRADLEY HYMAN
Next Generation Sequencing and its Application to Model Organisms
Grimmond, S.
Australia
The Impact of Next-generation Sequencing Technologies on Parasitic
Nematode Genomics
Mitreva, M.
Department of Genetics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63108
The application of genomics to study parasites from the phylum Nematoda has utilized
mainly the Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) based approaches. Following the completion of
the C. elegans genome sequence, the Genome Center (GC) at Washington University
submitted over 500,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from 36 nematode species, using the
conventional Sanger sequencing. Hence, genomic approaches are revolutionizing molecular
parasitology and the characterization of most genes now begins with their appearance in
sequence databases. However, due to the proliferation of large-scale sequencing projects in
recent years, several new sequencing technologies (so called ‘next-generation’ or ‘massively
parallel’) are becoming available and are already having a significant impact on genomics
and genetics in general. There are several dozen parasitic nematode whole genome projects
underway at the GC and other labs that will be completed in 3-5 years. The parasitic
nematode genomic projects at the GC also include sampling of the transcriptome through
massively parallel sequencing. Therefore, with so much emerging data our key focus is on
organizing this information in a manner that allows for the rapid comparison of gene-content
across species in the phylum. We will discuss how well the old and the new sequencing
technology complement each other and their pros and cons inferred from the analysis of the
available Sanger ESTs and the newly generated 2.25 million 454/Roche cDNAs from
parasitic nematodes.
5 th International Congress of Nematology, 2008 146