Angiostrongylus cantonensis is the main etiological agent of eosinophilic meningoencephalitis in humans. In last years, several outbreaks have been documented worldwide, characterizing an emerging global public health problem. There is no specific treatment for the disease and an urgent better knowledge about the mechanism of infection and worm survival is needed to better understand the pathology and to prospect possible new treatment approaches. We report the de novo assembly of the transcriptome, its full functional annotation and a reconstruction of complete metabolic pathways of A. cantonensis. All results are available at AngiostrongylusDB (http://angiostrongylus.lad.pucrs.br:443/admin/welcome). The study aimed to identify the active genes and to map the metabolic pathways possibly involved with the mechanisms of infection and survival in the host. Among 389 metabolic mapped pathways we highlight the heparan sulfate anticoagulant/antithrombotic pathways. We also identified homologous genes GP63 (leishmanolysin), CALR (calreticulin), ACE (peptidyl-dipeptidase A), involved in infection mechanisms of Tritryp parasites and TgHSP70 of Toxoplasma. The large dataset of functional annotation here presented may facilitate future functional genomics studies and provide new insights on treatment and diagnosis of A. cantonensis.

Funding: This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico do 342 Brasil [Grant numbers CNPq 401904/2013-0 (2013) and CNPq PQ1D 307005/2014-3 (2014)] and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior do Brasil (Edital 32, 2010). Acknowledgements: The authors thank the Laboratório de Alto desempenho (LAD) of the Polytechnic school da PUCRS and the High Performance Computing Technician Rafael Lorenzo Bellé for all technical support and Dr. Malcolm Jones for the fruitful discussions about A. cantonensis biology.