Developmental gene expression profiles of the human pathogen Schistosoma japonicum

Abstract

Background: The schistosome blood flukes are complex trematodes and cause a chronic parasitic disease of significant public health importance worldwide, schistosomiasis. Their life cycle is characterised by distinct parasitic and free-living phases involving mammalian and snail hosts and freshwater. Microarray analysis was used to profile developmental gene expression in the Asian species, Schistosoma japonicum. Total RNAs were isolated from the three distinct environmental phases of the lifecycle -aquatic/snail (eggs, miracidia, sporocysts, cercariae), juvenile (lung schistosomula and paired but pre-egg laying adults) and adult (paired, mature males and eggproducing females, both examined separately). Advanced analyses including ANOVA, principal component analysis, and hierarchal clustering provided a global synopsis of gene expression relationships among the different developmental stages of the schistosome parasite.

Whole-genome sequence of Schistosoma haematobium

“…Adult-enriched transcription was shown for 2,975 genes, of which 965 were significantly upregulated in females and 2,010 in males. These findings are similar to those of recent microarray studies of S. mansoni and S. japonicum 18,19 , although our interpretation is guarded, at this stage, as the animal hosts for parasite production and analytical methods differed among studies. Indeed, given the substantial depth of the present RNA-Seq data set (compared with microarray), we were able to accurately profile enriched biological pathways in the different stages and sexes of S. haematobium that clearly reflect its biology (Supplementary Note, Supplementary Fig.…”

“…Genes were selected within a 25-pixel radius from each node, representing male (M), female (F) and egg (E), and those constitutively transcribed genes within a central 100-pixel radius. In addition, data for transcripts enriched in adult male, adult female or egg stages of S. haematobium were compared with microarray data sets available publicly for respective developmental stages of S. japonicum 19 and S. mansoni 18,60 . Homology-based comparisons were also made at the protein level (tBLASTx, E value ≤ 10 −5 ).…”

Acyl homoserine lactone-based quorum sensing in a methanogenic archaeon

“…The fluorescently labelled cDNA was hybridized with an Agilent M. harundinacea 6Ac Custom 8 Â 15 K Microarray according to the manufacturer's protocol. The Feature Extraction Software (Agilent Technologies) was used for data acquisition and GeneSpring (Agilent Technologies) was used for further data processing according to published procedures (Gobert et al, 2009). To validate the microarray data, qPCRs were performed using the primer pairs listed in Supplementary Table S3. The PCR mixtures included 200 nM primers, 1-100 ng of cDNA and 10 ml of 2 Â SYBR Green PreMix (TaKaRa, Dalian, China).…”

Zoonotic and Animal Vector Mediated Encephalitides

“…As genomes become available, a further characterization of phylogenetic relationships can be made (Mavarez et al, 2002;Bourhy et al, 2005;Jackson et al, 2010). PCR applications, including multiplex PCR (Paris et al, 2008), nested PCR (James et al, 2011), heteroduplex PCR (Lee et al, 2002), reverse transcriptase PCR and direct sequencing (Telford et al, 1997), restriction fragment length polymorphic analysis (Freylikhman et al, 2008), DNA microsatellite markers (Shrivastava et al, 2005) and microarray technology (Gobert et al, 2009;Omsland et al, 2009) will aid in the detection of the pathogens to a greater level of sensitivity and specificity than previously achieved. Aside from genetic advances, immunological based assays utilize antibody/antigen specificity to detection many pathogens (Enyaru et al, 2010).…”