Exposure of gut bacterial isolates to the anthelminthic drugs, ivermectin and moxidectin, leads to antibiotic-like phenotypes of growth inhibition and adaptation.

Due to their broad-spectrum activities, ivermectin and moxidectin are widely used anthelminthics in veterinary and human medicine. However, ivermectin has recently been shown to perturbate bacterial growth. Given the macrolide-like structure of both ivermectin and moxidectin, there is a need to characterize the antibiotic spectrum of these anthelminthics and their potential implications in the development of cross-resistance to macrolides and other families of antibiotics.

A novel barcoded nanopore sequencing workflow of high-quality, full-length bacterial 16S amplicons for taxonomic annotation of bacterial isolates and complex microbial communities.

Due to recent improvements, Nanopore sequencing has become a promising method for experiments relying on amplicon sequencing. We describe a flexible workflow to generate and annotate high-quality, full-length 16S rDNA amplicons. We evaluated it for two applications, namely, (i) identification of bacterial isolates and (ii) species-level profiling of microbial communities.

Different gut microbial communities correlate with efficacy of albendazole-ivermectin against soil-transmitted helminthiases.

Soil-transmitted helminth infections represent a large burden with over a quarter of the world's population at risk. Low cure rates are observed with standard of care (albendazole); therefore, a more effective combination therapy (albendazole and ivermectin) is being investigated but showed variable treatment efficacies without evidence of intrinsic parasite resistance. Here, we analyzed the microbiome of Trichuris trichiura and hookworm-infected patients and found an association of different enterotypes with treatment efficacy.