Worm Breeders Gazette submission deadline

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Dear Worm Researchers,

The deadline for submissions to the next issue of The Worm Breeder’s Gazette is Monday, September 15, with publication following about a week later. While we will accept all articles, we would like to emphasize CRISPR methodology in this issue. So, if you have developed or improved any techniques you think would be useful to the community, please take the time to write up your protocol and submit it at http://www.wormbook.org/wbg/.

In addition to articles summarizing research, we also welcome announcements (particularly for new labs), editorials, humor, and artwork.

Articles should be a single page in length.

Looking forward to your contributions to the Gazette,

Jane

Jane Mendel
Editor, WormBook

Trichuris suis

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A new genome of a zoonotic whip worm species, Trichuris suis, has been made publicly available by the Gasser lab of Melbourne University.

As part of the research into the unique properties of the genome, a male and a female worm has been sequenced, assembled and annotated as described in Genome and transcriptome of the porcine whipworm Trichuris suis. Jex AR, Nejsum P, Schwarz EM, Hu L, Young ND, Hall RS, Korhonen PK, Liao S, Thamsborg S, Xia J, Xu P, Wang S, Scheerlinck JP, Hofmann A, Sternberg PW, Wang J, Gasser RB. Nat Genet. 2014 Jul;46(7):701-6. doi: 10.1038/ng.3012. Epub 2014 Jun 15.

It has been included as part of the WS243 release of WormBase and is shown on a Genome Browser, as well as on orthology sections of genes. Flatfiles of the raw data are also available on ftp://ftp.wormbase.org.

Ancylostoma ceylanicum

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The parasitic nematode Ancylostoma ceylanicum is a hookworm, closely related to the hookworms Ancylostoma duodenale and to Necator americanus.

These three species collectively infect over 500 million human beings, typically by burrowing into the skin as dauer-like L3 larvae, passing through the bloodstream and lungs, being swallowed along with mucus cleaning the lungs, and becoming permanently established as blood-drinking adults in the small intestine.

Despite the great difference in their life cycles from that of C. elegans, hookworms (and related parasites such as Haemonchus contortus) are actually more closely related to C. elegans than is the free-living nematode Pristionchus pacificus.

The bulk of hookworm infections are by A. duodenale and N. americanus; however, these two species do not generally infect other mammals, making them difficult to study experimentally. In contrast, A. ceylanicum competently infects humans, dogs, cats, and golden hamsters, making it an experimentally tractable human hookworm as well as an emerging zoonotic parasite (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23968813). Researchers at Cornell, Caltech, and UCSD have therefore sequenced the genome and transcriptome of A. ceylanicum in order to determine possible new targets for drugs and vaccines.

Its genome has been included as part of the WS243 release of WormBase and is shown on a Genome Browser, as well as on orthology sections of genes. Flatfiles of the raw data are also available on ftp://ftp.wormbase.org.

A Streamlined System for Species Diagnosis in Caenorhabditis

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We would like to congratulate Marie-Anne Felix, Asher Cutter and Christian Braendle on their publication in PLoS One, which describes new name designations for 15 new nematode species.

Of special interest to WormBase users:

  • C.sp 7 will become Caenorhabditis afra
  • C.sp 11 will become Caenorhabditis tropicalis

    • Update of Meloydogyne incognita

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    The new WormBase release of WS243 will include an update to the Meloidogyne incognita assembly, which is based on scaffolding the original data published in 2008.
    It will be available from the M.incognita section of the WormBase FTP site, as well as from a Genome Browser and as orthologs from already existing gene pages.

    Users wishing use M. incognita data obtained from WormBase in publication should cite the following:

    Abad P et al. Genome sequence of the metazoan plant-parasitic nematode Meloidogyne incognita. Nat Biotechnol. 2008 Aug;26(8):909-15.