Abstract
Internal parasitic nematodes are a global animal health issue causing drastic losses in livestock. Here, we report a H. contortus representative draft genome to serve as a genetic resource to the scientific community and support future experimental research of molecular mechanisms in related parasites. A de novo hybrid assembly was generated from PCR-free whole genome sequence data, resulting in a chromosome-level assembly that is 465 Mb in size encoding 22,341 genes. The genome sequence presented here is consistent with the genome architecture of the existing Haemonchus species and is a valuable resource for future studies regarding population genetic structures of parasitic nematodes. Additionally, comparative pan-genomics with other species of economically important parasitic nematodes have revealed highly open genomes and strong collinearities within the phylum Nematoda.
Highlights
The barber’s pole worm, Haemonchus contortus, is one of the most economically important and common pathogenic nematodes infecting small ruminants worldwide (Laing et al 2013; Schwarz et al 2013)
We report a H. contortus representative draft genome to serve as a genetic resource to the scientific community and support future experimental research of molecular mechanisms in related parasites
To sequence the genome of H. contortus NZ_Hco_NP, a hybrid strategy using long-read Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and short-read Illumina technologies based on 598 million paired-end (PE) and 328,750 reads was applied
Summary
The barber’s pole worm, Haemonchus contortus, is one of the most economically important and common pathogenic nematodes infecting small ruminants worldwide (Laing et al 2013; Schwarz et al 2013) This parasite can be controlled using anthelmintic drugs, its remarkable natural tendency to develop resistance threatens the global livestock industry. Despite the importance of this issue, remarkably little is known regarding the molecular mechanisms of resistance to most anthelmintic drug groups This is, at least in part, due to: 1) a lack of genomic resources (Consortium 2019); 2) extremely high levels of genetic diversity of worm populations (Gilleard and Redman 2016); 3) limited number of well-characterized anthelmintic resistant isolates (Gilleard 2013); 4) at best only circumstantial and inconsistent list of leading candidate genes (Kotze et al 2014); 5) tools and techniques with which to study these experimentally challenging organisms (Wit and Gilleard 2017). We describe the complete mitochondrial (mt) genome of NZ_Hco_NP and explore its evolutionary relationships against the complete mt genomes for all 41 nematode species or isolates currently available
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