Authors

M P Evans¹; E Gardiner¹; M Tsifaki¹; P McVeigh¹; E McCammick¹; N J Marks¹; A Margariti¹; A G Maule¹;  ¹ Queen's University Belfast, UK

Discussion

The liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica, exerts a significant burden on global livestock production and poses an emerging threat to human health. Combining this with the increasing resistance to triclabendazole, the frontline drug, makes the search for new flukicides critical to efforts to combat the disease. The stem cells of the liver fluke, similar to the neoblasts that give planarians their regenerative ability, could be valuable sources of novel drug targets that disrupt the growth and development of the parasite in the mammalian host. Using transcriptomic datasets generated from schistosomes, we have identified 92 homologues of the 128 genes down-regulated in irradiated schistosomes (i.e. those in which proliferative cells were destroyed), and show that the majority of these show up-regulation in in vivo parasites versus parasites cultured in vitro, correlating with our growth-rate dynamics data. We also demonstrate for the first time the use of fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) to investigate cell populations of the fluke at a single-cell level and show that we can obtain a single cell suspension of F. hepatica cells that includes viable proliferating cells. With further optimization and in combination with stem-cell ablation techniques including irradiation and anti-proliferative drugs, this technique will facilitate the isolation of neoblast-like cells from the fluke and seed omics approaches to interrogation of their biology.