Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, United States.
Department of Pharmacology, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States.
Curr Top Dev Biol. 2022;147:345-373. doi: 10.1016/bs.ctdb.2021.12.015. Epub 2022 Feb 16.
Platyhelminthes can perhaps rightly be described as a phylum of the good, the bad, and the ugly: remarkable free-living worms that colonize land, river, and sea, which are often rife with color and can display extraordinary regenerative ability; parasitic worms like schistosomes that cause devastating disease and suffering; and monstrous tapeworms that are the stuff of nightmares. In this chapter, we will explore how our research expanded beyond free-living planarians to their gruesome parasitic cousins. We start with Schistosoma mansoni, which is not a new model; however, approaching these parasites from a developmental perspective required a reinvention that may hold generalizable lessons to basic biologists interested in pivoting to disease models. We then turn to our (re)establishment of the rat tapeworm Hymenolepis diminuta, a once-favorite model that had been largely forgotten by the molecular biology revolution. Here we tell our stories in three, first-person narratives in order to convey personal views of our experiences. Welcome to the dark side.
扁形动物门可以被恰当地描述为一个有好、坏、丑的门类：令人瞩目的自由生活的蠕虫，栖息在陆地、河流和海洋中，它们通常色彩斑斓，并具有非凡的再生能力；像血吸虫这样的寄生蠕虫会导致毁灭性的疾病和痛苦；还有可怕的绦虫，是噩梦的素材。在这一章中，我们将探讨我们的研究如何从自由生活的涡虫扩展到它们可怕的寄生表亲。我们从曼氏血吸虫开始，它并不是一个新的模型；然而，从发育的角度来研究这些寄生虫需要一种重新发明，这可能对那些有兴趣转向疾病模型的对基本生物学感兴趣的人具有普遍的借鉴意义。然后，我们转向我们对大鼠绦虫 Hymenolepis diminuta 的（重新）建立，这是一个曾经很受欢迎的模型，在分子生物学革命中已经被很大程度上遗忘了。在这里，我们通过三个第一人称的叙述来讲述我们的故事，以传达我们个人对这些经历的看法。欢迎来到黑暗面。
