Understanding Eimeria population, genetic and antigenic diversity to improve control against coccidiosis

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor Damer Blake, Royal Veterinary College
• Wednesday 12 February 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Seminar Room, Tennis Court Road, Dept of Pathology..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Catherine Merrick, cjm48.

Eimeria can cause the disease coccidiosis, most notably in chickens where the global cost has been estimated to exceed UK£10 billion every year. Anticoccidial chemoprophylaxis has become an essential component of modern poultry production, although resistance is rife. Live parasite vaccines are available, but production capacity and relative cost limit uptake. In response, interest in the development of cost-effective recombinant vaccines has been rekindled. The successful translation of such vaccines to the field will depend in part on parasite population structure and the extent of pre-existing antigenic diversity, influencing opportunities for vaccine breakthrough. For Eimeria these variables remain almost completely unknown. Seven Eimeria species have long been recognised to infect chickens, all with a global enzootic distribution. However, the description of three new species with high prevalence across much of the southern hemisphere that are not controlled by current vaccines has disrupted long established dogma. Using SNP -based genotyping population structure has been sampled for Eimeria tenella, revealing an intriguing dichotomy between northern and southern populations characterised by distinctive spatial haplotype occurrence with evidence of near clonality and panmixia. Deep amplicon sequencing hints at unexpected complexity in field Eimeria populations while targeted exon sequencing has revealed a conflicting lack of diversity for the vaccine candidates Apical Membrane Antigen 1 (AMA1) and Immune Mapped Protein 1 (IMP1), suggesting that for Eimeria protein functionality may outweigh immune evasion. This is in direct contrast to the situation in other apicomplexans such as Plasmodium, and is most likely underpinned by the biology of the direct and acute coccidian life cycle in the definitive host.

This talk is part of the Parasitology Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Biology
• Cambridge Infectious Disease
• Cambridge Infectious Diseases
• Graduate-Seminars
• Life Sciences
• Life Sciences
• ME Seminar
• Pathology Seminars
• Seminar Room, Tennis Court Road, Dept of Pathology.
• my_list
• other talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.