Parasitic worms (helminths) are responsible for more than a billion human infections globally and have a devastating impact on livestock and agriculture. As international efforts to sequence the genomes of parasitic helminths gather pace, the WormBase groups at EMBL-EBI and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have collaborated on the creation of a new BBSRC-funded resource, WormBase ParaSite, to analyse, store and present information on these genomes. WormBase ParaSite is closely integrated with and complementary to the main WormBase web-site, the central mission of which is to support researchers using Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system.

The first release of WormBase ParaSite includes annotated genomes from 82 species (57 nematodes and 25 platyhelminths), with features including:

• A genome browser for every genome
• Comparative analysis (gene orthology and paralogy) using the Ensembl Compara Gene Tree inference method
• Full text and sequence search (BLAST) services

Development in the coming months will see improved cross-linking to and from the main WormBase site, incorporation of new genomes and data sets, and new querying interfaces and tools oriented towards the use-cases of parasitologists.