Anisakis pegreffii (Nematoda: Anisakidae) is the main cause of the emerging fish-borne zoonosis called anisakidosis. Humans are accidentally infected when they eat raw marine food contaminated by the infective third-stage larvae developing a gastrointestinal and allergic disease, and co-occurrence of larve with tumors. Despite its wide economic and medical relevance, most of the scientific efforts were focused so far on food safety, leaving subtle mechanisms of pathogenicity and tumorigenic potential as topics largely underinvestigated. In the last years the application of high-throughput sequencing methods are increasing and advances in computational biology and bioinformatics have greatly accelerated discovery within basic and biomedical research for some parasitic diseases. However, good quality genomes are missing for Anisakis pegreffii, thus impeding proper functional characterization of genes and other regulatory molecules as transcripts and miRNAs. For these reasons, we propose here to obtain the first highly accurate genome assembly of the zoonotic species A. pegreffii. To this aim, we will combine traditional Illumina sequencing coupled with a cutting-edge technology as the High-Fidelity long reads sequencing of PacBio. Furthermore, the highly accurate genome will assist the fine characterization and mapping of our already collected data on the transcriptomes and the miRNAs enriched in exosomal fraction of the extracellular vesicles, which will be experimentally validated by qPCR. Data will be publicly available and this will benefit the entire scientific community interested in food-borne zoonoses and in genomic and molecular aspects of pathogenicity.
