Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Mark your calendars: 4th International Blastocystis Conference - in Crete!

Hello all,

I'ts been a while, but I hope that you've been updating yourself through various networks, social media platforms, and what not.

Importantly, please mark your calendar for the 4th International Blastocystis Conference in Crete on the 18-19 September, 2024. Moreover, on the day before the conference (17th of September 2024) we will organise two parallel workshops, one on the Epidemiology of Blastocystis (Working Group 1 of the COST Action) and the other one on subtyping (Working Group 2 of the COST Action).

You can find more info on the conference here.

And more about the COST action on Blastocystis here and here

We hope to see as many of you there as possible!

This is your chance to meet all of us old Blasto-Buggers who never seize to be amazed... ! 😀

Bonus info: The 1st International Blastocystis Conference took place in Ankara in 2015 and was organised by Prof Funda Dogruman-Al and her lovely team. The next one took place in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2018, where Prof Juan-David Ramirez and his great colleagues pulled off a really nice event. The third one was a virtual on (during COVID) in 2021, and now we look forward to the fourth one in the Mediterranean Sea!




Thursday, February 20, 2020

Free access to fresh articles on Blastocystis - subtypes and lifecycle

Anyone with the links below can access our recent articles on Blastocystis for free over the next 50 days.

Please go here to download
Preempting Pandora’s Box: Blastocystis Subtypes Revisited

Please go here to download
Blastocystis - Parasite of the Month 

Both have been published in the March 2020 issue of Trends in Parasitology.

Happy reading!  

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Tropical Parasitology: An email interview with Dr. Christen Rune Stensvold

I was invited to give an email interview to Tropical Parasitology. I hope that especially a few young researchers will find it inspiring. You can read it here

You'll hear me explain why I think young parasitologists should spend some time with Blastocystis....

Thank you!


With WHO in a village in Laos - in the middle of the jungle. The WHO were carrying out a biannual deworming programme. Picture taken in 2003 courtesy of Dr Hanne Strandgaard. The children were educated on the parasites for which they got treatment and on how to prevent them.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Blastocystis PhD position available with Tasos

Hi all,


Just spreading the word: 


There is a funded PhD opportunity (!!!) in Dr Tsaousis' lab on Blastocystis:

'Identifying the parasitic or passenger role of Blastocystis, in patients with gastrointestinal disease'

available for September 16th start!  

 

Deadline for applications is 22 April.


Find more info here



Special issue on Blastocystis, Pneumocystis and microsporidia in 'Frontiers'

The online journal 'Frontiers in Microbiology - Infectious Diseases' will be publishing a special issue on Blastocystis, Pneumocystis and microsporidia as opportunistic eukaryotes and controversial pathogens.

Please go and see the call for papers here.

Topics editors include Olga Matos, Lihua Xiao and myself.

(Blastocystis images towards the right courtesy of Marianne Lebbad)

Friday, October 19, 2018

2nd International Blastocystis Conference Wrap-Up - Part II

So, a lot of people would like to know about the take-home messages from the recent 2nd International Blastocystis Conference in Bogotá. There were many, and I might develop one more post to make room for more.

The first - and most important - thing I'd like to emphasise is that the community interested in Blastocystis is growing. And we're seeing a clearly multidisciplinary approach to studying the parasite. I think that this is what we need. The initial ideas about having Blastocystis-specific conference were developed by Funda Dogruman-Al and myself, and we both have a background in clinical microbiology. We have realised that in order to make sense of Blastocystis in a clinical microbiology (and infectious disease) context, we need research input from bordering fields, such as biology (genomics, cell biology, etc.), veterinary medicine (host specificity and impact of Blastocystis on animal health), gastroenterology (connection to microbiota and the extent of Blastocystis being involved in functional and inflammatory bowel diseases), bioinformatics (processing NGS data such as those pertaining to the profiling of gut microbiota communities), and ecology (people who are used to study interactions between organisms). At the conference, I believe that all (or at least most) of these fields were represented.

I was also thrilled to realise that many researchers have now adapted to the subtype terminology, - and even the allele terminology appears to be useful and pragmatic.


Status on the Blastocystis genome project. Slide by Andrew Roger.

Andrew Roger highlighted that the genomes of Blastocystis are more different than the genomes of human and mouse! Well-annotated genomes are available for ST1, ST4, and ST7, while draft genomes are available for subtypes 2, 3, 6, 8 and 9. 

 
What use are genomes? Summary provided by Andrew Roger.


Animal experimental modelling is possible. We know that rats can be colonised/infected by Blastocystis ST1 strain from a human and shed cysts in stool for more than one year.

Blastocystis is one of the few parasites that are really easy to culture and easy to get by. If we can learn to induce cysts in culture, these can be separated by sucrose gradient centrifugation or other methods and used for inoculation into volunteers, pigs, or rats, for instance. This can be used to study the impact of Blastocystis on the host, including immune system and gut microbiota. Baseline microbiota profiling is necessary prior to inoculation to know about the background variation in study individuals.

In terms of Blastocystis and gut microbiota: Since we published our conspicuous observations in 2015, many researchers have now corroborated our findings: Blastocystis is typically linked to increased microbiota richness and diversity; - something, which is generally considered a benefit and which is linked not only to gut health, but also to leanness. Especially the negative association between Blastocystis and Bacteroides has been highlighted by many now. It will be very interesting to learn why this is so. It also seems that Blastocystis are more common in individuals with a gut microbiota dominated by strictly anaerobes rather than facultative aerobes.

Faecal microbiota transplantaion (FMT): The recommendation of excluding FMT donors based on the finding of Blastocystis came up many times and was discussed in the context of the microbiota studies. It appear relevant to investigate further whether FMT donors should really be dismissed if they are Blastocystis-positive.

Some of the take home messages from Raul Tito Tadeo's talk.

In many animal groups, Blastocystis is a very common finding. These include mostly omnivores or herbivores. On the contrary, Blastocystis is very rare in strict carnivores, with no consistency in subtype distribution, indicating that these animals are not natural hosts of Blastocystis.The Blastocystis incidentially found in these hosts might stem from the prey that they have eaten.

Finally, I wish to highlight that there are excellent resources available from the pre-conference workshop, including an R script for microbiota analysis, and some tools for Blastocystis genome annotation. Please visit my previous blog post for links to these.

We cannot totally dismiss pathogenicity of Blastocystis; if existing, it may involve both strain- and host-specific factors.

And.... it's out: The time and venue for the 3rd International Blastocystis Conference will be Crete in 2021 (possibly June), with Eleni Gentekaki and Anastasios Tsaousis being involved in both the scientific and local organising committees... ! Please mark you calendars!

Andrew Roger, Raul Tito Tadeo, Kevin Tan and myself (taking the picture) enjoying some Club Colombia.


Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Experimental models for Blastocystis research - new paper out!

Experimental models are critical to advancing our knowledge on the role of Blastocystis in health and disease.

We have now published our work led by Dr Katerina Pomajbikova on the suitability of the rat as a model of Blastocystis colonisation. We observed that the rats were able to sustain the colonisation for more than one year, when a ST1 strain isolated from a human was used.

Next step could now be to monitor gut microbiota before and after challenge with Blastocystis cysts and look for changes at both individual and community level,, changes in alpha and beta diversity, etc.

The paper is free for download here until August 19, 2018.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Updates on 2nd International Blastocystis Conference in Bogotá!

Hi everyone,

There's only little more than three months before the kick-off of our 2nd International Blastocystis Conference! And as in the case of our 1st conference in Ankara in 2015, participants are in for a real treat! I simply don't know where to begin... !



Well, for starters, here's the hotel in which the conference will take place (11–12 October). It's the Hotel Estelar La Fonata in Bogotá! I think it looks amazing!

Prior to the very conference (9–10 October), there will be a two-day workshop at Universidad del Rosario - Quinta De Mutis.

Please go to the conference website and find more information: http://www.urosario.edu.co/Blastocystis/en/home/

The line-up of faculty members is impressive; again, please visit website to update yourself with workshop leaders and keynote speakers.

We will be dealing with anything from diagnostics to genomics, from epidemiology to cell biology, from experimental models to phylogenetics!

There will be plenty of Colombian coffee to sample and you might also with to sign up for the gala dinner!

So, don't miss out on the opportunity to put yourself into the very epicentre of Blastocystis research and experience the dynamic city of Bogotá!

Importantly, the deadline for abstract submission is 1st of July, so please everyone: Get your act together - submit your abstract today and support us with your presence and your enthusiasm with regard to the most common parasite in the human gut: Blastocystis!

SEE YOU THERE!!!

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