Brief overview

Strongyloides ratti is a common gastro-intestinal parasite of the rat. The adult parasites are female only, about 2mm long and live in the mucosa of the small intestine. These parasites produce eggs that pass out of the host in its faeces. In the environment infective larval stages develop either directly or after a facultative sexual free-living adult generation. Infective larvae infect hosts by skin penetration.

S. ratti is the laboratory analogue of the parasite of humans, S. stercoralis. S. stercoralis is a wide-spread parasite of humans, occurring principally in the tropics and sub-tropics: some 100-200 million people are infected worldwide. Infection of immunosuppressed individuals can result in disseminated strongyloidiasis, in which worms occur throughout the body. This can be fatal unless anti-Strongyloides therapy is given. Other species of Strongyloides parasitise a wide range of vertebrates.

Further reading:
Viney, M.E. and Lok J.B. Strongyloides spp. (May 23, 2007), WormBook, ed. The C. elegans Research Community.

The project

This is a Wellcome Trust funded project to sequence and analyse the nuclear genome of Strongyloides ratti with the goal of producing a reference quality genome sequence.

Collaborators

We are collaborating with Mark Viney (University of Bristol), Fiona Thompson (University of Bristol) and Adrian Streit (University of Tübingen).

Accessing Sequence data

Data are being made available on our ftp site and Blast Server as they become available.

There are currently 437,784 unassembled shotgun reads totalling 280.93 Mb which have been assembled into 9792 contigs with a cumulative length of 37.45MB.