This week the BCHC welcomed Dr. Kate Rawlinson from the The Marine Biological Laboratory, Massachusetts. Dr. Rawlinson delivered a fascinating talk titled “How do the eyeless larvae of Schistosoma mansoni detect light?” at the DLS Infectious Diseases seminar, where she proposed mechanisms which allow environmental and intramolluscan stages of the parasite to detect light using four uniquely expressed photosensitive opsins. Using combined immunofluorescence and single cell approaches, Dr. Rawlinson demonstrated how the unique spatial expression of these opsins during each larval stage of S. mansoni may be linked to behaviours essential to progression of the life cycle, including positioning at the water surface (where definitive hosts are likely) and penetration into the snail intermediate host.
Dr. Rawlinson’s work builds on work completed in collaboration with the BCHC and Aberystwyth University, including characterisation of genes defining the S. mansoni circadian rhythm and generation of single-cell transcriptomic atlases for the larval stages. You can read more work by the Rawlinson group here.
The BCHC would like to thank Dr. Rawlinson for taking the time to deliver a talk at the DLS Infectious Diseases seminar. We are currently open to external speakers for this seminar series and would invite anyone interested to reach out using the contact information on this website.
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