Creation of a public resource for housing and analyzing genomic data from Theileria parva and other Apicomplexan species to facilitate vaccine and diagnostic development

Theileria parva is a tick- borne parasite that causes a fatal disease in cattle known as East Coast Fever (ECF). This disease, which kills over 1 million cattle each year in sub-Saharan Africa, results in economic losses exceeding $200 million annually. The completion of the genome sequence of T.parva (Gardner et al.2005) has been an important milestone in order to facilitate research on parasite biology, assist the identification of schizont antigens for vaccine development ( Graham et al.2006), and extend comparative apicomplexan genomics, in particular with Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria and with T. annulata ( Pain et al.2005), which causes tropical bovine theileriosis. To date access to the T.parva genome data has been difficult due to the lack of a user- friendly interface that provide access not only to genome data but the large set of expression data from MPSS (Bishop et al., 2005) and ESTs. In addition , the current system does not lend itself for ongoing curation as new data becomes available ( Shah et al., 2005).