Schistosome genomics and beyond: News and views

Recent years have seen a revolutionary change in the study of parasitic organisms. Catalysed by the improvements of gene technology and biochemical analyses, comprehensive molecular and cellular information has been generated for various organisms, including parasites. Today, we mark the beginning of the post-genomic era, which necessitates interpretation and exploitation of the sequence data. In this context crucial steps include the analyses of transcriptomes, proteomes, and glycomes and the development of technologies for functional genetics to study a gene of interest within its genomic setting. This special issue of Experimental Parasitology intends to summarize recent progress in these fields as applied to schistosome research, which was prompted by the Glasgow ICOPA XI meeting in August 2006. In preparation of this remarkable event, Mike Doenhoff implemented a domain of schistosome-related topics covering genomics and post-genomics. Mike succeeded to convoke colleagues working in these representative areas to organize four sessions subdivided into genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics/glycomics, and transformation/ transduction. Motivated by the excellent meeting, the great scientific coverage, the very productive and valuable exchanges, and the superb contributions in each session, we discussed the idea of summarizing this most recent progress in journal articles. This was kindly supported by John Horton and the Editorial Board of Experimental Parasitology. The result is now presented in this issue (summaries of each contribution are listed below) and includes reviews, research articles, and mixed versions of both, comprising all mentioned areas and intersections among those, but also research aiming to solve open questions of schistosome biology using the genome data. This was discussed in a separate ICOPA XI session on signaling processes in helminth development.