Polymorphic microsatellites in the human bloodfluke, Schistosoma japonicum, identified using a genomic resource

The Asian bloodfluke, Schistosoma japonicum, causes serious human disease in several parts of eastern Asia, and in particular in China where more than 30 million people living in the tropical and subtropical zones are at risk [1]. On the heels of widespread progress in controlling S. japonicum over the past two decades [2], China is facing the challenges posed by re-emergence of schistosomiasis in localities where control activities have nearly ceased and where apparent elimination had been achieved [2,3]. In comparison to traditional assessment methods, molecular tools will be increasingly important as China targets regions with low prevalence and low infection intensity for elimination [4-6] on the path to reducing schistosome infection to less than 1% by 2015 [2]. Such tools will be important for high-resolution monitoring of infections in snails and in mammalian hosts, elucidating transmission networks, and improving the targeting of interventions to achieve final elimination of the disease.This important pathogen has already received attention from population geneticists using microsatellites [7,8]. Most of the loci used had been found by examination of the GenBank accessions for S. japonicum data existing at that time or through testing of primers that amplified microsatellite loci in another bloodfluke, S. mansoni. A near-complete draft genome of S. japonicum has been released by the Chinese Human Genome Center in Shanghai [9] and the raw data are available at http://lifecenter.sgst.cn/schistosoma/cn/schistosomaCnIndexPage.do webcite. An earlier study [10] reported 17 loci from this resource. In this study we report on additional loci suitable for research into gene flow in S. japonicum in Sichuan Province. Results of this search are presented here. We searched this resource for microsatellite loci using the following criteria:？ Repeats should be 2, 3 or 4-mer,？ The number of tandem repeats should be in the range 10-25,？ Loci should not include compound repea