Microphallus sp. Transcriptome. Microphallus sp. 'livelyi' strain:Livelyii

We sequenced, assembled, and annotated the Microphallus sp. transcriptome using samples of metacercaria dissected from snail hosts collected from four New Zealand populations. In total, 18,000 contigs were assembled with a mean length of 504 base pairs. Of the combined reads from all four populations, 83% mapped to our assembled transcriptome. We found Microphallus sp. transcripts that are potentially associated with infection by examining Gene Ontology (GO) terms associated with immunological processes, and those that are important for infection in other pathogens. To explore putative genes associated with successful infection, we compared the Microphallus sp. transcriptome to other well-studied trematodes. We recovered the 28S rDNA gene sequence from the Microphallus sp. transcriptome and reconstructed a phylogeny to determine the relationship of our parasite to other digenean trematodes, including several well-studied, medically important species. We placed our species of Microphallus sp. within the Microphalledoia clade, and determined it is closely related to Microphallus fusiformis and an undescribed Microphallus sp. from Australia. We found that the Microphallus sp. transcripts are similar to other digenean trematodes with more extensive genomic resources, specifically Schistosoma mansoni, Fasciola hepatica, and Clonorchis sinensis. Finally, because the parasite metacercaria form in the snail host but also infect a final vertebrate host, we sought to determine if genes expressed in Microphallus sp. metacercaria were more similar to the genes expressed in stages of S. mansoni that infect the vertebrate or invertebrate host. We found that there is high similarity between our transcriptome and the miracidia stage of S. mansoni that actively infects its snail host.