Abstract | Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are single-pass sequence reads made from randomly selected cDNA clones, which represent the expressed genes of an organism. EST analysis is an efficient and cost-effective method for sampling the genes expressed by an organism or tissue. ESTs have been a focus of eukaryotic parasite genome initiatives for several years 1 (see the Parasite Genome web server at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/parasites/parasite-genome.html), and parasitic organism ESTs make up a significant portion of the dbEST subsection of GenBank 2 , 3 . EST data sets can be mined for useful or interesting content using standard similarity-based search tools such as BLAST. In the field of molecular parasitology, such approaches have led to the discovery of many new potential drug targets and vaccine candidates. However, EST data sets also contain important additional types of information. |
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