[26]. The C strain infects 100% of the molluscs when 10 miracidia per individual are used for infection. An average number of 3.6 sporocysts develop in the mollusc [28]. The IC strain infects only 4% of the molluscs using the same conditions. After selleck chemicals Bortezomib incubation of host and parasite extracts, precipitated products were pelleted by centrifugation and analysed by SDS-PAGE. Different centrifugation speeds were used as well as different controls consisting in incubation and centrifugation of plasma or sporocyst extracts alone. The electrophoretic profiles of precipitate materials are shown in figure 1. Figure 1 Interactome experiments. Gel analysis revealed that 29 bands were differentially represented between interaction experiments and controls (Figure 1). These bands were cut.

The corresponding proteins were submitted to tryptic digest and analysed by tandem mass spectrometry for identification. Thirty proteins were identified – among them 20 are S. mansoni proteins (Table 1) and 10 are from B. glabrata (Table 2). During the experimental procedure, extracts were incubated 2.5 hours at 26��C. We cannot exclude the fact that proteolysis occurs. This phenomenon could explain why sometimes these multiple bands were obtained for the same proteins. Table 1 Schistosoma mansoni interactome identification. Table 2 Biomphalaria glabrata interactome identification. S. mansoni proteins can be classified mainly into 5 groups taking into account their putative function and/or structural features: glycoproteins; calcium binding proteins; chaperone/stress proteins; antioxidant enzymes and proteins involved in immune regulation (Table 1).

As far as B. glabrata proteins are concerned, they correspond mainly to lectins or other proteins listed in Table 2. The functions of the majority of the proteins identified are speculative because they are inferred from homologies with known molecules from other organisms after BLAST analysis and protein domain searches. Nevertheless, some of them are of particular interest in the present context, especially lectins from the host and glycoproteins from the parasite. Indeed host recognition molecules (like lectins) and carbohydrate containing molecular determinants from S. mansoni are excellent candidates for participating in an immune complexe. Several molecules belonging to these functional classes were identified. In B.

glabrata, the FREPs [17], [21], and another putative lectin, a galactose binding-like, were clearly identified (Table 2). Different FREP family members were revealed using mass spectrometry. Among the peptides identified, some of them correspond specifically to FREP2, FREP12 and FREP13 (see Figure 2 for details). Figure 2 Alignment of BgBRA-FREP2 sequence with AV-951 others FREPs from B. glabrata. In S. mansoni, SmPoMucs were precipitated (Table 1).