A comprehensive understanding of life on earth must include the study of parasites

Nematodes originate from the ocean and become the most abundant animals on earth. You can find them everywhere, even in extreme places like Antarctica or desert. Nematodes have three feeding types: free-living, predator, and parasitic. Current research on nematodes is based on the model organism - Caenorhabditis elegans, and parasitic ones, which cause severe diseases on animal health and agricultural productivity. However, how the parasitism of parasitic nematodes evolved from their free-living ancestor is still unclear. We mainly work on plant parasitic nematodes and aim to move towards the study of free-living nematodes.

Hence, in our research, we aim to collect free-living nematodes from the environment and receive their genome or transcriptome data. We will focus on sequencing clade I, clade II, and clade C free-living nematodes, which mainly lived in the aquatic environment and are considered the ancestor of nematodes. By comparing their genome and transcriptome, we aim to discover how nematode parasitism evolve.

Project members

1. Chen-Kuo Lai [PhD candidate @ NTU GSB program]
2. Yi-Chien Lee [PhD candidate @ TIGP Biodiversity program]

Selected publication

The Aphelenchoides genomes reveal substantial horizontal gene transfers in the last common ancestor of free-living and major plant-parasitic nematodes
CK Lai, YC Lee, HM Ke, MR Lu, WA Liu, HH Lee, YC Liu, T Yoshiga, T Kikuchi, PJ Chen* and IJ Tsai*.
Molecular Ecology Resources
揭示植物寄生線蟲水平基因轉移的演化史

Single-worm long-read sequencing reveals genome diversity in free-living nematodes
YC Lee, HM Ke, YC Liu, HH Lee, MC Wang, YC Tseng, T Kikuchi and IJ Tsai
Nucleic Acid Research

Discovery, biology and genome of Caenorhabditis inopinata, a sibling of C. elegans
N Kanzaki†, IJ Tsai†, R Tanaka†, VL Hunt†, D Liu, K Tsuyama, Y Maeda, S Namai, R Kumagai, A Tracey, N Holroyd, SR Doyle, GC Woodruff, K Murase, H Kitazume, C Chai, A Akagi, O Panda, HM Ke, FC Schroeder, J Wang, M Berriman, PW Sternberg, A Sugimoto and T Kikuchi
Nature Communications
中研院：解開線蟲模式物種身世之謎！發現秀麗隱桿線蟲的近緣種
Author commentry: Caenorhabditis inopinata: the unexpected sibling species of C. elegans