The Transcriptome of Trichuris suis - First molecular insights into a parasite with curative properties for key immune diseases of humans. PLoS One 6: e23590

Background: Iatrogenic infection of humans with Trichuris suis (a parasitic nematode of swine) is being evaluated or promoted as a biological, curative treatment of immune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and ulcerative colitis, in humans. Although it is understood that short-term T. suis infection in people with such diseases usually induces a modified Th2-immune response, nothing is known about the molecules in the parasite that induce this response. Methodology/Principal Findings: As a first step toward filling the gaps in our knowledge of the molecular biology of T. suis, we characterised the transcriptome of the adult stage of this nematode employing next-generation sequencing and bioinformatic techniques. A total of,65,000,000 reads were generated and assembled into,20,000 contiguous sequences ( = contigs);,17,000 peptides were predicted and classified based on homology searches, protein motifs and gene ontology and biological pathway mapping. Conclusions: These analyses provided interesting insights into a number of molecular groups, particularly predicted excreted/secreted molecules (n = 1,288), likely to be involved in the parasite-host interactions, and also various molecules (n = 120) linked to chemokine, T-cell receptor and TGF-b signalling as well as leukocyte transendothelial migration and natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity, which are likely to be immuno-regulatory or-modulatory in the infected host. Thi