Journal article
The Opisthorchis viverrini genome provides insights into life in the bile duct
ND Young, N Nagarajan, SJ Lin, PK Korhonen, AR Jex, RS Hall, H Safavi-Hemami, W Kaewkong, D Bertrand, S Gao, Q Seet, S Wongkham, BT Teh, C Wongkham, PM Intapan, W Maleewong, X Yang, M Hu, Z Wang, A Hofmann Show all
Nature Communications | Published : 2014
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5378
Abstract
Opisthorchiasis is a neglected, tropical disease caused by the carcinogenic Asian liver fluke, Opisthorchis viverrini. This hepatobiliary disease is linked to malignant cancer (cholangiocarcinoma, CCA) and affects millions of people in Asia. No vaccine is available, and only one drug (praziquantel) is used against the parasite. Little is known about O. viverrini biology and the diseases that it causes. Here we characterize the draft genome (634.5Mb) and transcriptomes of O. viverrini, elucidate how this fluke survives in the hostile environment within the bile duct and show that metabolic pathways in the parasite are highly adapted to a lipid-rich diet from bile and/or cholangiocytes. We als..
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Awarded by National Institutes of Health
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the staff of BGI-Shenzhen for their contributions. This project was funded by the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia and BGI-Shenzhen (R.B.G.). Other support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Melbourne Water Corporation (R.B.G.) and Genome Institute of Singapore (P.T.) is gratefully acknowledged. This project was also supported by a Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (grant number VR0007) on its Peak Computing Facility at the University of Melbourne, an initiative of the Victorian Government. N.D.Y. holds an NHMRC Early Career Research Fellowship. P.W.S. thanks the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We would specifically like to acknowledge the research scientists that developed the programs used in this study. Given restrictions on the number of publications that could be cited, we were unable to include all original articles in the methods section. Instead, we have included links to their respective websites. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Eduard Gasser.