Establishing transgenic schistosomes

Targeting integration-competent vectors to IVLE may surmount this limitation. [...]there are other points in the developmental cycle where the germ line might be accessed, including the daughter sporocysts where the germ cells are comparatively large (Coustau and Yoshino [30] and references therein). [...]there is a pressing need now to develop functional genomics tools for schistosomes to determine the importance of these new genes. * Functional genomics approaches hold promise to determine the nature and importance of genes of the human schistosomes. * Retroviral and transposon-mediated gene manipulation, using integration-competent, vector-based technologies, have been shown to be feasible for schistosomes. * The retrovirus murine leukemia virus, which is widely used in stem cell and gene therapy research, and the piggyBac transposon, originally isolated from the genome of a moth, have now been shown to be active in schistosomes, to integrate into schistosome chromosomes, and to provide gains-of-function for the reporter genes firefly luciferase, GFP, and neoR. * Both MLV and piggyBac both have potential in high-throughput insertional mutagenesis studies, feasible now that draft genome sequences are available. * Vector-based RNAi--retroviral vector-mediated RNA interference demonstrated in schistosomes--targeting a hemoglobin-digesting protease provides proof-of-principle that vector-based RNAi is feasible to target any of the ~13,000 protein encoding genes of the schistosome.