Neospora caninum Transcriptome or Gene expression

The parasite Neospora caninum is an important cause of bovine abortion in the cattle industries of the world. Bovine and canine isolates of N. caninum can differ in their ability to cause disease in mice and cows and little knowledge is known about the mechanisms of virulence or pathogenicity. For example, NC-Liverpool is extremely pathogenic and infection of laboratory mice results in death, whereas NC-Nowra is far less virulent. These observations suggest that there may be intrinsic, genetic differences amongst isolates which await identification. Consequently Illumina next generation sequencing was used to compare the tachyzoite transcriptomes of NC-Liverpool and NC-Nowra through alignment to the N. caninum genome. The existence of differentially expressed genes occurring in tachyzoites was investigated in silico using a variety of different models, including Cufflinks and CuffDiff or HTSeq, in order to determine how the two tachyzoite populations differ.