Infections with filarial worms cause serious physical impairment and affect tens of millions of people in tropical and subtropical countries. To better understand the biology and phar- macology of these parasites, Brugia malayi is often used as a model. This parasite can be maintained in the laboratory in Mongolian jirds, enabling researchers to test drugs in vivoand in vitro, among other studies. The effects of removing worms from their hosts and cul- turing them may affect many aspects of their physiology, including response to drugs, but the extent to which the worms undergo changes during culture has remained unknown. Using deep RNA sequencing and bioinformatics tools, we examined the global transcriptomic profile of B. malayi females at four different time points over 5 days in culture. Focusing on genes that are differentially expressed at various time points, we observed a general perturbation of the expression profile between dissection from the host and receipt after shipment. The expression of several genes remained changed at the end of the experi- ment, after 5 days under controlled conditions; in particular, genes encoding cuticle colla- gens were prominently represented and strongly overexpressed
