Microsatellite marker analysis of Haemonchus contortus populations from Pakistan suggests that frequent benzimidazole drug treatment does not result in a reduction of overall genetic diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The impact of drug selection pressure on the overall genetic diversity of parasitic nematode populations in the field is poorly understood. In this study, we address this issue for the small ruminant parasite Haemonchus contortus in the Punjab, Pakistan. This region provides an opportunity to compare H. contortus populations that have been subjected to a prolonged period of frequent benzimidazole drug treatments on government farms with parasite populations that have been exposed to little or no drug treatment in neighbouring pastoral herds.Adult H. contortus worms were collected from the abomasa of small ruminants from three government farms frequently using benzimidazole drugs, and closed to animal movement, for over 30 years and also from from eighteen pastoral herds subject to minimal drug selection. The frequency of three known benzimidazole resistance associated mutations was determined in each parasite population. For the seven parasite populations in which resistance mutations were found, the diversity, geographical distribution and phylogenetic relationships of isotype-1 β-tubulin benzimidazole resistance haplotypes were determined. In addition, the genetic diversity of the parasite populations on the three government farms were compared with those from four pastoral herds.The F200Y (TAC) resistance mutation was present at a very high frequency in H. contortus populations from government herds, but not from pastoral herds, consistent with their respective drug selection histories. Population genetic analysis, using a panel of microsatellite markers, revealed that there was little genetic differentiation among the parasite populations with no significant difference in the overall genetic diversity between government and pastoral herds. In addition, sequence analysis of the isotype-1 β-tubulin locus revealed multiple F200Y (TAC) haplotypes demonstrating soft selective sweeps even in government herds with little or no contemporary parasite migration.The results suggest that, although the frequent drug treatment used on government farms has selected for a high frequency of benzimidazole resistance mutations, there has been little or no reduction in the overall genetic diversity of the selected parasite populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".