Freshwater snails are important in the transmission of schistosomiasis. One method of schistosomiasis control is to interrupt the transmission of the schistosome parasite during the intra-molluscan phase of its development. Gene-silencing technology involving the use of dsRNA have used an injection route to disrupt gene translation in the Schistosoma mansoni snail host in an effort to investigate how inhibition of various transcripts can affect the dynamics of the snail/parasite interaction. However, the injection method previously utilized is impractical, especially when working with juvenile snails. Knight and colleagues describe their work to improve on the injection method with the goal of making the use of gene silencing technology more widely applicable to functional gene studies in snails.
Drugs currently available to treat leishmaniasis are toxic to the patient and drug-resistant parasites are emerging. Fortunately, interest in confronting the treatment challenges has grown and new technology has led to an increase in high-throughput screens conducted against Leishmania. In order to gain insight into the most efficient screening strategy, De Muylder and colleagues compared two methods, one targeting the easily cultured insect-infective promastigote stage of the parasite, and the other, targeting the clinically relevant but more difficult to culture intracellular amastigote stage.
