Psyched to have this now published. Thanks to the reviewers and editors for helping us improve the paper. Congrats to the undergrad authors!
journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
Great to see @wheelerlab.bio paper out, using a custom imaging and computational system for tracking and screening schistosome miracidia, helping to elucidate how the larvae respond to chemical signals from snails: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Flyer asking for donations to Feed My People via the Wheeler lab's food and fund drive. Donate here: https://give.fmpfoodbank.org/give/748810/#!/donation/checkout
Flyer requesting donation of food to Feed My People. Drop off locations on the UWEC campus are listed: Davies, McIntyre Library, Phillips, AMH, Haymarket, Towers, and the Suites
In response to the SNAP lapse and the ensuing rush on food banks, students in my lab organized a food & fund drive for a local food bank, Feed My People. Our goal is to raise 500 lbs of food and $500, which would amount to thousands of meals. We'd appreciate your generosity!
The project also needs to continue. Do epigenetic marks established during egg development have effects even in mammalian stages? That is a very important question that needs answering, because the answer could have implications on how faithfully our lab model is representing what happens in nature.
Speaking personally, my students have no interest in continuing to use intestines 🤣 ...but I might make them 🤷🏻♂️ We will see. I think this is an important conversation for the schistosome community to have.
So, what now? There's a reason everyone works with parasites derived from liver - the intestines are a pain to work with and yield very few eggs. Anything that requires a few thousands miracidia, perhaps even life cycle maintenance, would involve hundreds to thousands of rodents if using intestines.
Our next question was if these differences have effects on miracidia behavior (what we study). The answer is (unfortunately) yes. Most quantitative track features from unstimulated miracidia are different. Aggregated feature summaries show distinct clusters based on tissue origin as eggs.
We wondered - do these differences dissipate over time? Are miracidia transcriptomes synchronized after hatching? The answer is no. Even after hatching and equilibrating at room temperature for a few hours, miracidia transcriptomes can still be distinguished by their tissue origin as eggs.
Well, last year Peterková et al. showed that eggs derived from either the liver (dead end) or intestine (natural migration/excretion route) are transcriptomically *and* antigenically distinct. This was a very important finding. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
The problem is that the liver is a dead end for the schistosome life cycle. The reason we use liver eggs is entirely due to convenience - they accumulate there in the tens of thousands and hatch to miracidia that can competently infect snails, what's there to lose?
We work with schistosome miracidia, the larval stage that hatches from eggs after being excreted from the definitive host into water. Almost everyone who works with schistosomes use miracidia that were hatched from eggs derived from rodent liver.
I am pleased to present a project we've been working on for the least year to try to answer a fundamental question - does a parasite's developmental niche as an egg have effects on larval stages? We show that the answer is very much yes - which has a few implications. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
New research w/ @jacobphd.bsky.social et al. published today in Nature Communications: Genes linked to schistosome resistance identified in a genome-wide association study of African snail vectors doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🐌🪱🧬
Other than myself, ever single author of this manuscript is an undergraduate student. What a blast it is to work these inspiring students.
Along the way, we generated a few models for controlling snail (and thus human) schistosome infections that are completely novel, and we took the first small steps toward that ultimate goal. Seeing the basic biology provide a foundation for new translational approaches has been incredibly exciting.
Very excited and proud to release a project that I’ve been thinking about for at least 7 years, well before I started my faculty position. We built an imaging and computational platform from the ground up to help answer some outstanding questions in schistosome miracidia biology.
💻🧬🦟🪱
Our annual Celebration of Scholarship and Creative Activity is a yearly highlight of mine. Proud of the students and their 5 poster presentations!
Such an important resource. Subscribe with me!
UWEC students won an unprecedented three (3!) Goldwater Scholarships this year, and our lab member Rachel was one of them! I’m so proud of Rachel’s development as a scientist and excited that she’s been recognized as a future leader. Check out the story on her award: www.uwec.edu/stories/firs...
Now published at IJP:DDR! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We have also now added a dedicated documentation website: wrmxpress-gui.readthedocs.io/latest/.
The GUI runs in a browser and is easily installed through Docker Desktop. We've made it easy to download example data from our Zenodo repo, which allows users to see the pipelines in action.
Additionally, the GUI was made possible by substantial updates to the backend by folks in the Zamanian lab (@zamanian.bsky.social). v2.0 is officially out: github.com/zamanianlab/.... It includes new segmentation and tracking algorithms and support for 384-well plates.
Very excited to release the first project from my lab, an update of wrmXpress with a graphical user interface:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The GUI design, code, and testing was done by *undergraduates* in my lab. I'm so proud of them and what they've produced.
We can probably point you in the right direction, depending on your experimental/video setup. Feel free to DM/email.
Where were you when the American biomedical research apparatus collapsed?
Speaking of Google Chrome…as I do at least once a year, this week I tried to force myself to switch to Safari and yet once again failed because it just isn’t a very good piece of software.
Hi everyone! For those of us who have a lab website, it’s simple to use the website domain as your BSKY handle. It’s also possible to provide subdomains for other members of the lab. Checkout their instructions: bsky.social/about/blog/4...
