Biotechnology advances and the parasitology paradigm: From genomes to multi-omics and translation

Parasitic diseases impose a substantial and often underestimated burden on human and animal health, food security and economic development. Over recent decades, advances in biotechnology have expanded parasitology into a genomics-enabled field. Early progress stemmed from the use of molecular markers, PCR and immunological assays, followed by draft genomes generated through high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics. The advent of long-read sequencing and chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) mapping technologies subsequently enabled chromosome-scale assemblies, providing robust frameworks for comparative analyses across parasitic taxa. Building on this progress, multi-omics platforms - including transcriptomics, proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics - have been applied to characterise developmental trajectories, host-parasite interactions and parasite-specific pathways, and the integration of these datasets is facilitating the construction of systems-level models linking genetic variation to phenotype and disease processes. More recently, artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning, has been applied to predict essential genes, accelerate structure-based drug discovery, guide reverse vaccinology and integrate heterogeneous datasets, thereby establishing new approaches for genome-guided identification of diagnostic markers and candidate vaccine and therapeutic targets. Importantly, perspectives within the discipline have emphasised that taxonomy, ecology and field parasitology remain critical for contextualising molecular findings. The future of molecular parasitology will depend on integrating breadth with depth; genomic and multi-omics resources should align with the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles and be embedded within a One Health framework, enabling fundamental discoveries to translate into improved diagnostics, novel therapeutics and sustainable strategies for parasite control.