Frédéric recently returned from a successful tour of the UK and France (March 22–30), where he presented exciting new findings on the genetic basis of snail host specificity in schistosomes and the identification of promising candidate genes. In Liverpool, he presented at a Royal Society meeting focused on "Exploiting nematode genomes to illuminate parasite biology." The meeting’s themes included the use of comparative genomics to identify drug resistance genes, the exploration of hyper-divergent genomic regions, the necessity of pangenomes, and the genomics of host specificity and signatures of selection.
Frédéric then visited London to meet collaborators at the Natural History Museum (NHM) for the first time. He delivered a seminar on the power of schistosome genetics, ranging from laboratory experiments to field surveillance of drug resistance. Our work has made extensive use of the NHM SCAN collection to explore the genomics of natural parasite populations. Frédéric had the opportunity to visit the collection and meet with researchers, thanks to Tom Pennance and Bonnie Webster.
Finally, Frédéric visited the University Via Domitia in Perpignan to give a similar seminar and update our collaborators on his host specificity results. These collaborators provided the schistosome and snail populations for Frédéric’s project and helped set up additional crosses.
The results stirred up a great deal of excitement!
