Medicinal Leeches
Medicinal leeches have been a familiar remedy, best known for their therapeutic uses in medical practices. The treatment associated with medicinal leeches is called, Hirudotherapy, which has been used to treat patients for centuries. Since its progress was remarkable and was scientifically proven, the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) legislated the use of leech in clinical purposes in 2004 due to its profound use for medicinal purposes. Medicinal leeches are famous for their broad applications ranging from, local bloodletting, amputation, restoring blood circulation and to the latest technology in skin grafting and reattachment surgery.
Despite the intense focus on their beneficial uses, there is still setbacks like the declining numbers in leech population due to its exploitation for medicinal purposes and post operative infection of leech bacterial flora in humans who undergo leech therapy. So, the focus now is towards producing the bioactive compound produced by leeches using recombinant technology like cloning the gene responsible for the production of the compounds into vectors and producing them in bacteria or yeast expression system. In order to achieve these the genes have to be identified. However, there is very limited genomic and transcriptome data for leech in public databases. Therefore, AIMST University in collaboration with UiTM sequenced the genome of a local medicinal leech variety, Hirudinaria javanica, using Illumina Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platform. So, the focus of the study is to annotate the genome and identify novel genes, promoters, molecular markers and so on.
Annotation generally refers to the process of interpreting raw sequence data into useful biological information. By which, it describes the genome and transforms raw genomic sequences into useful biological information through computational analyses, auxiliary biological data and biological expertise.
Initially a contig assembly of the contigs generated from NGS will be performed either by mapping it to reference genome