UNASSIGNED: @entity281 have a considerable impact on global @entity1 health as well as animal welfare and production. Although @entity325 with multiple parasite species within a host is common, there is a dearth of tools with which to study the composition of these complex parasite communities. Helminth species vary in their pathogenicity, epidemiology and drug sensitivity and the interactions that occur between co-infecting species and their hosts are poorly understood. We describe the first application of deep amplicon sequencing to study parasitic @entity2199 communities as well as introduce the concept of the gastro-intestinal "nemabiome". The approach is analogous to 16S rDNA deep sequencing used to explore microbial communities, but utilizes the @entity2199 ITS-2 rDNA locus instead. Gastro-intestinal parasites of @entity291 were used to develop the concept, as this host has many well-defined gastro-intestinal @entity2199 species that commonly occur as @entity325 . Further, the availability of pure mono-parasite populations from experimentally infected @entity291 allowed us to prepare mock parasite communities to determine, and correct for, species representation biases in the sequence data. We demonstrate that, once these biases have been corrected, accurate relative quantitation of gastro-intestinal parasitic @entity2199 communities in @entity291 fecal samples can be achieved. We have validated the accuracy of the method applied to field-samples by comparing the results of detailed morphological examination of L3 larvae populations with those of the sequencing assay. The results illustrate the insights that can be gained into the species composition of parasite communities, using grazing @entity291 in the mid-west USA as an example. However, both the technical approach and the concept of the 'nemabiome' have a wide range of potential applications in @entity1 and veterinary medicine. These include investigations of host-parasite and parasite-parasite interactions during @entity325 , parasite epidemiology, parasite ecology and the response of parasite populations to both drug treatments and control programs.

Exploring the Gastrointestinal "Nemabiome": Deep Amplicon Sequencing to Quantify the Species Composition of Parasitic XXXX Communities.

@entity1 :: ('9606', 'Species') :: ['human'] @entity2199 :: ('6239', 'Species') :: ['nematode'] @entity281 :: ('MESH:D007239', 'Disease') :: ['Parasitic helminth infections'] @entity325 :: ('MESH:D060085', 'Disease') :: ['complex co-infections', 'co-infection'] @entity291 :: ('9913', 'Species') :: ['cattle']
@entity2199 :: (6239,Species) :: ['Nematode']
