• Question: what interests you about 'small parasitic worms'?

    Asked by trollolol to Anouk, Judith on 11 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by lanacrow20, ameliawestern.
    • Photo: Anouk Gouvras

      Anouk Gouvras answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      oh they are just fascinating! They have adapted to living INSIDE other animals, other hosts. The one I research, the schistosome, infects a mammal by going through its skin into the blood system. The blood system carries it all over the body till it gets to the liver, there it finds a partner and reproduces, the eggs come out through urine and stool and end up in a water body (like a lake) they hatch out and the little larvae travel to a snail. They infect a snail and the worm then multiplies over and over and over again until there are hundreds of little larvae coming out of the snail ready to infect another mammal. It amazes me that something like that, a life cycle like that exists and has evolved! It has been around for thousands of years, they even found it in ancient egyptian mummies. And its still around today. Its so sad that it causes so much damage to the children that become infected with it. SO I think I also like the fact that I can help with this. By researching this animal that I find so interesting I can also help programs that are trying to control it, stop people getting infected and treat people that are. So I feel that my interest and my work is useful to people. Also it means that I get to travel to a lot of places that I wouldn’t normally go, and I see what its like to live and work in some of the poorest communities in sub-Saharan Africa. I do enjoy my work a lot thanks to my interest in ‘small parasitic worms’ 🙂

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Well…I don’t actually work on parasitic worms, but I love Anouk’s story about the ones that make the mice get eaten by the cats because they want to end up in the cat! Parasites can teach us a lot.

      A colleague of mine works on Trypanosomes: they are little single-celled parasites that live in the blood and cause sleeping sickness and other diseases. They have a really interesting way of splicing their messenger RNAs (splicing explained, I hope, in my profile….) so that every single one has the same beginning, even though the ends are all from different genes. They join two separate molecules together to do this. Some people have done some work to see if this could be used to help people with faulty genes: if one half of the person’s gene was OK and the other not, it might be possible to put in just half a gene and let the cell do the rest using splicing. Not sure how far that work has got, though.

Comments