E Schistosoma mansoni at the molecular and cellular biology of helminth parasites VI meeting

Abstract

Molecular information about eukaryotes has increased exponentially in the last decade. Sequencing of genomes and transcriptomes of model eukaryotic organisms has been followed by efforts in many groups to obtain equivalent information on helminth parasites. Large-scale molecular information is opening a door to understanding the intricate molecular and cellular biology of complex eukaryote parasites and raising the expectations to the ability of interfering with parasite-host interactions. Recognizing the need to increase the exchange of ideas in the area of helminth parasites, the international scientific community has gathered around a specialized meeting as early as 1997, when the first "Parasitic Helminths from Genomes to Vaccines" meeting took place in Edinburgh, UK, organized by Malcolm Kennedy from the University of Glasgow, and by Mark Blaxter and Rick Maizels, from the University of Edinburgh. A second meeting took place in Edinburgh in 1999, under the same title.In 2002 the event was renamed "Molecular and Cellular Biology of Helminth Parasites III" and it has been moved to the isle of Hydra, in Greece, where all subsequent events of the series have taken place. On September 5-10, 2010 the "Molecular and Cellular Biology of Helminth Parasites VI" meeting was organized by Kleoniki Gounaris and Murray Selkirk from the Imperial College, UK, and by Rick Maizels, from the University of Edinburgh. The meeting has an attendance limited to approximately 150 scientists, and the 2010 event comprised one keynote lecture, another 52 oral presentations with discussions in the mornings and evenings, and two poster sessions at night. We have invited several of the speakers who presented their work on Schistosoma mansoni to contribute articles to the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências.In this volume, there are five contributions on S. mansoni. All of the authors have reviewed knowledge in the specific area of their work and have contributed novel results and/or novel perspectives on their subjects of study. Evidence of non-coding RNA expression in S. mansoni is reviewed by Oliveira et al. (2011). This is an example of analysis that has only been possible because of the combined availability of the parasite genome sequence (Berriman et al. 2009) and of large scale transcriptome data which was pioneered by Franco et al. (1997) and considerably extended by Verjovski-Almeida et al. (2003). Among other topics, these authors map all publicly available ESTs to the genome sequence, thus identifying those long (> 200 nt) non-coding RNAs transcribed from the opposite strand of protein-coding genes and provide microarray data on the differential expression of long non-coding RNAs in different life cycle stages of the parasite (Oliveira et al. 2011).Serpins or serine protease inhibitors are a structurally conserved family of macromolecular inhibitors found in virtually all biological systems. Quezada and McKerrow (2011) give here another very interesting example as to how the completion and annotation of the genomes of S. m...