Abstract
Parasitic nematodes (roundworms) and platyhelminths (flatworms) cause debilitating chronic infections of humans and animals, decimate crop production and are a major impediment to socioeconomic development. Here we report a broad comparative study of 81 genomes of parasitic and non-parasitic worms. We have identified gene family births and hundreds of expanded gene families at key nodes in the phylogeny that are relevant to parasitism. Examples include gene families that modulate host immune responses, enable parasite migration though host tissues or allow the parasite to feed. We reveal extensive lineage-specific differences in core metabolism and protein families historically targeted for drug development. From an in silico screen, we have identified and prioritized new potential drug targets and compounds for testing. This comparative genomics resource provides a much-needed boost for the research community to understand and combat parasitic worms.
Highlights
Parasitic nematodes and platyhelminths cause debilitating chronic infections of humans and animals, decimate crop production and are a major impediment to socioeconomic development
We have produced draft genomes for 45 nematode and platyhelminth species and predicted 0.8 million protein-coding genes, with 9,132–17,274 genes per species (5–95% percentile range; see Methods, Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary Notes 1.1 and 1.2). We combined these new data with 36 published worm genomes—comprising 31 parasitic[8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30] and five free-living[18,31,32,33,34] species—and 10 outgroups[35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44] from other animal phyla, into a comparative genomics resource of 91 species (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Tables 2 and 4)
Findings made using a subset of high-quality assemblies that were designated ‘tier 1’ (Methods and Supplementary Table 4) were corroborated against all species
Summary
Parasitic nematodes (roundworms) and platyhelminths (flatworms) cause debilitating chronic infections of humans and animals, decimate crop production and are a major impediment to socioeconomic development. We have combined 36 published genomes[8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34] with new assemblies for 31 nematode and 14 platyhelminth species into a large genome comparison of parasitic and non-parasitic worms We have used these data to identify gene families and processes associated with the major parasitic groups. To accelerate the search for new interventions, we have mined the dataset of more than 1.4 million genes to predict new drug targets and drugs
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