La Trobe

The genomic basis of parasitism in the Strongyloides clade of nematodes

Download (1.7 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-01-22, 22:27 authored by VL Hunt, IJ Tsai, A Coghlan, AJ Reid, N Holroyd, BJ Foth, A Tracey', JA Cotton', EJ Stanley, H Beasley, HM Bennett, K Brooks, B Harsha, R Kajitani, A Kulkarni, D Harbecke, E Nagayasu, S Nichol, Y Ogura, MA Quail, N Randle, D Xia, NW Brattig, H Soblik, DM Ribeiro, A Sanchez-Flores, T Hayashi, T Itoh, DR Denver, Warwick GrantWarwick Grant, JD Stoltzfus, JB Lok, H Murayama, J Wastling, A Streit, T Kikuchi, M Viney, M Berriman
Soil-transmitted nematodes, including the Strongyloides genus, cause one of the most prevalent neglected tropical diseases. Here we compare the genomes of four Strongyloides species, including the human pathogen Strongyloides stercoralis, and their close relatives that are facultatively parasitic (Parastrongyloides trichosuri) and free-living (Rhabditophanes sp. KR3021). A significant paralogous expansion of key gene families - families encoding astacin-like and SCP/TAPS proteins - is associated with the evolution of parasitism in this clade. Exploiting the unique Strongyloides life cycle, we compare the transcriptomes of the parasitic and free-living stages and find that these same gene families are upregulated in the parasitic stages, underscoring their role in nematode parasitism.

Funding

The S. ratti transcriptome and proteome work was funded by Wellcome Trust grant 094462/Z/10/Z awarded to M.V., J.W. and M.B. The S. ratti, S. stercoralis, S. papillosus, P. trichosuri and Rhabditophanes sp. KR3021 genome sequencing and the S. venezuelensis optical mapping were funded by Wellcome Trust grant 098051. The S. venezuelensis work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (24310142, 21590466 and 24780044), KAKENHI for Innovative Areas 'Genome Science' (221S0002) and the Integrated Research Project for Human and Veterinary Medicine of the University of Miyazaki. I.J.T. was supported by Academia Sinica. Work was funded by grants AI050668 and AI105856 from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to J.B.L. and by Resource-Related Research Grant RR02512 from the US NIH to M. Haskins, which provided research materials for the study. J.D.S. received support from US NIH training grant AI060516. A.K. was supported by a predoctoral stipend from the Max Planck Society. Work by AK., D.H. and A.S. was funded by the Max Planck Society.

History

Publication Date

2016-02-01

Journal

Nature Genetics

Volume

48

Issue

3

Pagination

9p. (p. 299-307)

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

ISSN

1061-4036

Rights Statement

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the articles Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.