Table 3.
Examples of recent innovation in C. elegans with implications for anthelmintic research.
| Implication for | Studies | Approach/tool | Evaluated in other nematodes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole-organism phenotype screening | Andersen et al. (2015) | Improving COPAS BIOSORT (Union Biometrica) platform for high-throughput C. elegans development and fecundity assays | – |
| Law et al. (2015) | Evaluation of C. elegans as heterologous expression platform of insect and nematode drug targets to screen for monoamineric agonists | – | |
| Burns et al. (2015) | Large anthelmintic screening approach using C. elegans. Promising candidates were validated in Cooperia onchophora and Haemonchus contortus. MoA elucidation in C. elegans mutant screens | – | |
| Partridge et al. (2018) | INVertebrate Automated Phenotyping Platform (INVAPP) - plate-based imager system for high-throughput screening for compounds with effect on motility and development of nematodes | in the same study INVAPP was also evaluated for H. contortus (L3), T. circumcincta (L3), and adult Trichuris muris | |
| Spensley et al. (2018) | Imager-based high-throughput assay system that captures acute drug effects and recovery over time | – | |
| Risi et al. (2019) | wMicroTracker (InVivo Biosystems) - Image-free, infrared-based motility assay device to evaluate time-dependent drug effects. | Also, suitable e.g. for larval stages of Ostertagia ostertagi, C. oncophora, H. contortus, T. circumcincta (Liu et al., 2019) | |
| novel phenotype assays | Lockery et al. (2012), Weeks et al. (2018) | Electrophysiological microfluidic chip system for the recording of nematode electropharyngeograms (EPG) | EPG recordings of A. ceylanicum L4 larval stages, A. suum L3 stages (Weeks et al., 2016) |
| Liu et al. (2013) | micro-electro-fluidic (MEF) approach for real-time monitoring of the locomotion of nematodes | – | |
| Ding et al. (2017) | Evaluation of a microfluidic feedback system control (FSC) to identify effective anthelmintic drug concentrations | – | |
| Phiri et al. (2017) | Dye-based detection of anthelmintic induced cuticle damage via a colorimetric read-out | – | |
| Banse et al. (2019) | Stress-Chip - Motility-based microfluidic chip assay measures behaviors of 600 animals in parallel | – | |
| CRISPR-Cas9 mediated drug target characterization | McDiarmid et al. (2018) | Development of CRISPR-Cas9 strategy for whole-gene replacement of human genes in C. elegans in combination with subsequent phenotype analyses for drug screens | – |
| Hahnel et al. (2018), Kitchen et al. (2019), Dilks et al. (2020) | Introduction and characterization of parasite resistance alleles in C. elegans using CRISPR-Cas9 | Successful CRISPR-Cas9 mediated gene knock out approaches in different Strongyloides species (Gang et al., 2017; Lok et al., 2017) | |
| Natural genetic variation | Cook et al. (2017) | C. elegans natural diversity resource (CeNDR) provides a large collection of C. elegans wild isolates as well as whole-genome sequence data. The CeNDR strain collection was successfully used to elucidate natural genetic variation in nematode anthelmintic drug responses (Zdraljevic et al., 2017; Hahnel et al., 2018) | – |