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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

CP12: Sheep & Goats - 10 min talks
Location: Lecture Theatre 2
Session Chair: Vern Bowles, The University of Melbourne
Session Chair: Nichola Calvani, The University of Sydney

Presentation 2

A practical miracidial motility assay for assessing Fasciola hepatica sensitivity to compounds in vitro

Mengwei Zheng¹, Aya Taki¹, Tanapan Sukee¹, Jane Hodgkinson², Terry Spithill³, Robin Gasser¹, Neil Young¹

1: Department of Veterinary Biosciences, Melbourne Veterinary School, Faculty of Science, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia; 2: Veterinary Parasitology, Institute Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom; 3: Department of Ecological Plant and Animal Science and Centre for AgriBioscience, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, 3086, Australia

Fasciola hepatica causes fasciolosis in livestock and humans worldwide, yet reliable tools to assess drug efficacy against the early developmental stages of this parasite are lacking. Here, we developed an automated miracidial motility assay (MMA) using the WMicroTracker ONE infrared detection system to quantify the sensitivity of F. hepatica miracidia to anthelmintic compounds including clorsulon (CLORS), closantel (CLOS), triclabendazole (TCBZ) and triclabendazole-sulphoxide (TCBZ-SO). Systematic optimisation of assay conditions, including inoculum size, observation window and solvent concentration yielded a reliable platform for evaluating the sensitivity of F. hepatica miracidia from diverse geographic isolates to these compounds. Our results demonstrated that three compounds (CLOS, TCBZ and TCBZ-SO) produced concentration-dependent motility inhibition, whereas CLORS had no effect. CLOS displayed the highest potency among isolates from New South Wales (NSW), Tasmania (TAS) and Victoria (VIC), whereas TCBZ and TCBZ-SO exhibited isolate-specific sensitivity patterns. Miracidial responses of the NSW and TAS isolates to TCBZ, TCBZ-SO and CLOS were also compared in vitro with those of newly excysted juveniles (NEJs) produced from the same isolates. Overall, the findings show that MMA provides a reproducible, host-independent and high-throughput phenotypic platform for assessing miracidial sensitivity to compounds.