Question: @do you collect dna of other parasites?

Anouk Gouvras answered on 11 Jun 2012:

Well my project at the moment is for this parasite only (schistosomes and schistosomiasis) but at the Natural History Museum people are doing work on lots of different parasites. So we do have a big collection of other parasite DNA. And at Imperial College (who we work closely with) my supervisor (from when I did my PhD) is also researching a very different parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. It is not a worm, but a small multicellular protozoan animal. It infects lots of animals but mainly mice and cats. When it infects a mouse it actually wants to end up in a cat sooooo this very sneaky and clever parasite actually infects the mouse’s brain and change it’s behaviour so that when a mouse smells a cat instead of running away, which is the normal mouse response, it actually calmly goes TOWARDS the cat smell! And that means that it is more likely to be eaten by a cat. So the parasite ends up where it wants to be, in a cat! How amazing (and scary) is that! Other scientists are using the DNA of this parasite to work out how it does this.