V alidation of intestinal metabarcoded sequencing tool to determine the composition of Cryptosporidium species and Giardia intestinalis assemblages

This study involved designing metabarcoding Illumina Mi-Seq primers and developing an appropriate bioinformatic pathway to quantify the sequence reads generated for the different Cryptosporidium species and G. intestinalis assemblages present. The validity of the approach was tested using test pool samples generated from known proportions of available positive controls of different Cryptosporidium species and G. intestinalis assemblages. The approach was then used to analyse the composition of Cryptosporidium species and G. intestinalis assemblages in positive samples collected from animals and humans in Europe and the USA.