Hirudo verbana Central Nervous System Transcriptome

The goal of the generation of this central nervous system transcriptome from the leech Hirudo verbana is to create high quality reference sequences that the scientific community can use to enhance experimental approaches in investigating the leech nervous system. This project has already yielded over 100 ion channel and receptor sequences that were previously unidentified in Hirudo verbana. With this sequence information, molecular techniques that were technically challenging (such as qPCR, siRNA, in vivo translation, etc) are now more readily available for this system.