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. 2010 May 14:11:307.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-11-307.

Characterizing Ancylostoma caninum transcriptome and exploring nematode parasitic adaptation

Zhengyuan Wang  1 , Sahar Abubucker, John Martin, Richard K Wilson, John Hawdon, Makedonka Mitreva
Affiliations

Characterizing Ancylostoma caninum transcriptome and exploring nematode parasitic adaptation

Zhengyuan Wang et al. BMC Genomics. .

Abstract

Background: Hookworm infection is one of the most important neglected diseases in developing countries, with approximately 1 billion people infected worldwide. To better understand hookworm biology and nematode parasitism, the present study generated a near complete transcriptome of the canine hookworm Ancylostoma caninum to a very high coverage using high throughput technology, and compared it to those of the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and the parasite Brugia malayi.

Results: The generated transcripts from four developmental stages, infective L3, serum stimulated L3, adult male and adult female, covered 93% of the A. caninum transcriptome. The broad diversity among nematode transcriptomes was confirmed, and an impact of parasitic adaptation on transcriptome diversity was inferred. Intra-population analysis showed that A. caninum has higher coding sequence diversity than humans. Examining the developmental expression profiles of A. caninum revealed major transitions in gene expression from larval stages to adult. Adult males expressed the highest number of selectively expressed genes, but adult female expressed the highest number of selective parasitism-related genes. Genes related to parasitism adaptation and A. caninum specific genes exhibited more expression selectivity while those conserved in nematodes tend to be consistently expressed. Parasitism related genes were expressed more selectively in adult male and female worms. The comprehensive analysis of digital expression profiles along with transcriptome comparisons enabled identification of a set of parasitism genes encoding secretory proteins in animal parasitic nematode.

Conclusions: This study validated the usage of deep sequencing for gene expression profiling. Parasitic adaptation of the canine hookworm is related to its diversity and developmental dynamics. This comprehensive comparative genomic and expression study substantially improves our understanding of the basic biology and parasitism of hookworms and, is expected, in the long run, to accelerate research toward development of vaccines and novel anthelmintics.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Venn diagram showing distribution of BLAST matches. Amino acid level homologies with bitscore of 50 or better were considered. (A) A. caninum transcripts homologous to B. malayi and C. elegans. Only 23% of the transcripts (11,025/48,326) shared homology, leaving 37,301 transcripts to be specific to A. caninum. (B) B. malayi genes homologous to A. caninum and C. elegans. About 62% of the 11,609 B. malayi genes shared homology. Higher number of B. malayi genes had homologs to the parasitic A. caninum compared to the free-living C. elegans, and 4,406 B. malayi genes did not share homology.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of A. caninum transcripts based on stage or origin of each read. iL3: infective L3; ssL3: serum stimulated L3.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Enriched A. caninum GO terms of differentially expressed transcripts. F: female; M: male; iL3: infective L3; ssL3: serum stimulated L3.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Depleted A. caninum GO terms of differentially expressed transcripts. F: female; M: male; iL3: infective L3; ssL3: serum stimulated L3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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