Heligmosomoides polygyrus (Heligmosomoides bakeri)

BioProject PRJEB15396 | Data Source University of Edinburgh | Taxonomy ID 6339

About Heligmosomoides polygyrus (Heligmosomoides bakeri)

The nematode Heligmosomoides polygyrus (formerly known as Nematospiroides dubius) is a common parasite found in the duodenum and small intestine of woodmice and other rodents. The laboratory strain that has been sequenced was originally isolated from Peromyscus in California (Behnke and Harris, 2010); natural parasites from European wood mice (Apodemus sp.) are somewhat distinct, giving rise to some debate about the correct name and taxonomy of this species (Cable et al, 2006; Behnke and Harris, 2010; Maizels et al, 2010), with suggestions that the laboratory strain is named H. polygyrus bakeri or H. bakeri, and the European strain H. polygyrus polygyrus. The laboratory strain has been maintained as described by Camberis et al (2003) and is often used to model human helminth infection as it can establish chronic infection in different strains of mice.

There is 1 alternative genome project for Heligmosomoides polygyrus available in WormBase ParaSite: PRJEB1203

Genome Assembly & Annotation

Assembly

The genome of H. polygyrus was produced by the Blaxter Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. According to Chow et al. (2019), the short-read Illumina data were assembled and gapfilled using Platanus, and scaffolded using transcriptome evidence with SCUBAT2. Long-read PacBio data were used to further scaffold and gapfill the assembly with PBJelly.

Annotation

The gene predictions were produced by the Blaxter Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. According to Chow et al. (2019), the BRAKER pipeline was used to predict protein-coding genes using the RNA-Seq reads as evidence. The BRAKER general feature format (gff) file and the transcriptome assembly within MAKER2 were combined to predict untranslated regions of transcripts and remove low quality gene predictions.

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Key Publications

Chow FW, Koutsovoulos G, Ovando-Vázquez C, Neophytou K, Bermúdez-Barrientos JR, Laetsch DR, Robertson E, Kumar S, Claycomb JM, Blaxter M, Abreu-Goodger C, Buck AH. Secretion of an Argonaute protein by a parasitic nematode and the evolution of its siRNA guides. Nucleic Acids Res, 2019;47(7):3594-3606