Design

The main goal of our project has been the creation of a diagnostic tool for detecting the level of infestation of small strongyles (cyathostomins) in horse faeces. For this purpose, transcriptomics and phage display analysis have been performed. These techniques, however, require large amounts of clean, sterilized strongyles. For this reason, the first part of our project has been the recovery and the processing of the nematodes, to obtain samples usable for the following segments of the project.

While dealing with this task, however, many times our group has faces one problem: the lack of information. Not much, in fact, has been published about strongyles and techniques to handle them. For this reason, this first part of the project often involved the adaptation of a pre-existing protocol or the creation of entirely new ones.