Fighting a worm with its own genome

Hints for how to improve the treatment of parasitic infection might lie within the parasite's own genetic code

IMAGE:Tiny parasitic hookworms infect nearly half a billion people worldwide -- almost exclusively in developing countries -- causing health problems ranging from gastrointestinal issues to cognitive impairment and stunted growth... view more

Credit: Yan Hu/Aroian Lab/UC San Diego

Tiny parasitic hookworms infect nearly half a billion people worldwide--almost exclusively in developing countries--causing health problems ranging from gastrointestinal issues to cognitive impairment and stunted growth in children. By sequencing and analyzing the genome of one particular hookworm species, Caltech researchers have uncovered new information that could aid the fight against these parasites.

The results of their work were published online in the March 2 issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

"Hookworms infect a huge percentage of the human population. Getting clean water and sanitation to the most affected regions would help to ameliorate hookworms and a number of other parasites, but since these are big, complicated challenges that are difficult to address, we need to also be working on drugs to treat them," says study lead Paul Sternberg, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Medicines have been developed to treat hookworm infections, but the parasites have begun to develop resistance to these drugs. As part of the search for effective new drugs, Sternberg and his colleagues investigated the genome of a hookworm species known as Ancylostoma ceylanicum. Other hookworm species cause more disease among humans, but A. ceylanicum piqued the interest of the researchers because it also infects some species of rodents that are commonly used for research. This means that the researchers can easily study the parasite's entire infection process inside the laboratory.

The team began by sequencing all 313 million nucleotides of the A. ceylanicum genome using the next-generation sequencing capabilities of the Millard and Muriel Jacobs Genetics and Genomics Laboratory at Caltech. In next-generation sequencing, a large amount of DNA--such as a genome--is first reproduced as many very short sequences. Then, computer programs to match up common sequences in the short strands to piece them into much longer strands.

"Assembling the short sequences correctly can be a relatively difficult analysis to carry out, but we have experience sequencing worm genomes in this way, so we are quite successful," says Igor Antoshechkin, director of the Jacobs Laboratory.

Their sequencing results revealed that although the A. ceylanicum genome is only about 10 percent of the size of the human genome, it actually encodes at least 30 percent more genes--about 30,000 in total, compared to approximately 20,000-23,000 in the human genome. However, of these 30,000 genes, the essential genes that are turned on specifically when the parasite is wreaking havoc on its host are the most relevant to the development of potential drugs to fight the worm.

Read more:
Fighting a worm with its own genome