Sakunika Amarasingha
MSc Student
My research project focusing on advancing nemabiome metabarcoding for quantitative analysis of ruminant parasitic nematodes, using the latest NGS approaches such as Nanopore sequencing. Current nemabiome metabarcoding methods with short-read Illumina sequencing use ITS-2 rDNA marker to determine a nematode parasite community's species composition (relative abundance). This project aims to develop and optimize a long-read Nanopore sequencing approach for absolute quantitation of nematode parasites, to make nemabiome metabarcoding more robust and flexible as a diagnostic tool.