Improved domestic animal productivity is necessary in order to provide for an increasing world population over the next two to three decades and such improvement would be aided by an increase in the efficiency of nutrient utilization. This can be achieved by conventional genetic selection protocols but progress by this approach is slow. A more rapid but as yet largely unproven technique is the ...

In the last 40 years a number of modern techniques for improving animal lines have been developed. Artificial insemination has already had an enormous impact on the dairy industry. Techniques such as in vitro fertilization, embryo cloning, nuclear transplantation and transgenesis are reaching maturity. These techniques and their potential effects on the environment, genetic diversity, animal pr...

Genome sequences are available for the human blood flukes, Schistosoma japonicum, S. mansoni and S. haematobium. Functional genomic approaches could aid in identifying the role and importance of these newly described schistosome genes. Transgenesis is established for functional genomics in model species, which can lead to gain- or loss-of-functions, facilitate vector-based RNA interference, and...

Antibiotic selection markers have been recently developed in the multicellular model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and other related nematode species, opening great opportunities in the field of nematode transgenesis. Here we describe how these antibiotic selection systems can be easily combined with many well-established genetic approaches to study gene function, improving time- and cost-eff...