A drug repurposing screen for whipworms informed by comparative genomics.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are infected with the whipworm Trichuris trichiura. Novel treatments are urgently needed as current drugs, such as albendazole, have relatively low efficacy. We have investigated whether drugs approved for other human diseases could be repurposed as novel anti-whipworm drugs.

The Long and Short of Next Generation Sequencing for Research.

The intestinal parasite is a significant cause of severe diarrhoeal disease that can have long term effects. Therapeutic options remain limited despite a significant impact on public health, partly due to various challenges in the field of research, including the availability of genomic and transcriptomic data from environmental and clinical isolates. In this review we explore how long read DNA and RNA sequencing technologies have begun to provide novel insights into the biology of the parasite.

Hatching of parasitic nematode eggs: a crucial step determining infection.

Although hatching from eggs is fundamental for nematode biology it remains poorly understood. For animal-parasitic nematodes in particular, advancement has been slow since the 1980s. Understanding such a crucial life-cycle process would greatly improve the tractability of parasitic nematodes as experimental systems, advance fundamental knowledge, and enable translational research.

A human gut bacterial genome and culture collection for improved metagenomic analyses.

Understanding gut microbiome functions requires cultivated bacteria for experimental validation and reference bacterial genome sequences to interpret metagenome datasets and guide functional analyses. We present the Human Gastrointestinal Bacteria Culture Collection (HBC), a comprehensive set of 737 whole-genome-sequenced bacterial isolates, representing 273 species (105 novel species) from 31 families found in the human gastrointestinal microbiota. The HBC increases the number of bacterial genomes derived from human gastrointestinal microbiota by 37%.