Lee H. Pratt

I. multifiliis, otherwise known as Ich, is a parasitic protozoan that causes "white-spot" disease in freshwater fish. It not only has a substantial negative impact on commercial aquaculture, but on a more personal scale is the reason many fish are lost in home aquaria.

Dr. Theodore (Ted) Clark at Cornell University has led an effort to initiate an Ich gene discovery project. We have participated in this effort, together with Dr. Harry Dickerson of the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. In collaboration with this group, just over 25,000 Ich ESTs have been submitted to GenBank. A few (483) can be found by searching at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov for EST sequences with the search term 'INIT1 and Pratt'. The remainder are accession numbers EL903794 through EL928388.

ESTs were obtained from cDNA libraries prepared from infective theronts, fish-associated trophonts, tomonts at the 50-cell stage (also known as tomites), and trophonts derived from cells treated with i-antigen specific antibodies.  Follow this link to view the summary of the NSF grant proposal.

All sequence reads, together with the results of TGICL clustering, blast annotation against several databases, sequence alignments, and more, are currently being exported to the Oracle database at this web site, a process we hope to have complete by 4 April 2007.

Naming Convention for DNA Sequences - a clone name consists of the first three parts of a sequence name (cDNA library + block number + well)

JSP Sequence Viewer - Java ServerPages with searchable or drill-down access to sequences, GenBank links, and cluster information

MAGIC Sequence Viewer - this Java GUI provides phred quality values for each base, identifies vector/adapter, polyT, high quality trimmed length, access to BLAST, ability to create and download fasta files, and more - Java Web Start is required and a link to obtain it is provided