Nemabiome Website
Deep sequencing, including metabarcoding, using next-generation sequencing platforms, has revolutionized the study of microbial communities in humans, animals and the environment. Like microbes, parasites often exist in complex communities within a host and/or the external environment. We have coined the phrase “nemabiome” to describe the community of nematodes that inhabit a single host animal or environmental niche. We have recently described the use of deep amplicon sequencing, targeting the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS-2) rDNA locus or other targets of interest, for metabarcoding to study the gastro-intestinal nemabiome of cattle (Avramenko et al 2015, Avramenko et al 2017). Also targeted deep sequences to study anti-parasitic drug resistance mutations and the molecular epidemiology of resistance (Avramenko 2019, Venkatesan 2023) . Nemabiome sequencing provides a detailed picture of the species composition of the GIN parasite community structure in large sample sets and has a huge number of potential applications in diagnostics, surveillance and research.
