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Nic Wheeler

@wheelerlab.bio
376 followers 258 following 32 posts

Assistant professor of infectious disease. UW-Eau Claire Biology. Interested in NTDs, helminths, and Chelsea Football Club. Once submitted to Nature.

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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 16/12/2025
Psyched to have this now published. Thanks to the reviewers and editors for helping us improve the paper. Congrats to the undergrad authors! journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
journals.plos.org
Quantitative ethology of schistosome miracidia characterizes a conserved snail peptide that inhibits host recognition
Author summary Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease that affects hundreds of millions of people, especially in regions with limited access to clean water. To complete its life cycle, the parasite mu...
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Reposted by Nic Wheeler
Tom Pennance @schistosoma.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Great to see @wheelerlab.bio paper out, using a custom imaging and computational system for tracking and screening schistosome miracidia, helping to elucidate how the larvae respond to chemical signals from snails: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
Quantitative ethology of schistosome miracidia characterizes a conserved snail peptide that inhibits host recognition
Author summary Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease that affects hundreds of millions of people, especially in regions with limited access to clean water. To complete its life cycle, the parasite mu...
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 02/12/2025
In response to the SNAP lapse and the ensuing rush on food banks, students in my lab organized a food & fund drive for a local food bank, Feed My People. Our goal is to raise 500 lbs of food and $500, which would amount to thousands of meals. We'd appreciate your generosity!
Flyer asking for donations to Feed My People via the Wheeler lab's food and fund drive. Donate here: https://give.fmpfoodbank.org/give/748810/#!/donation/checkoutFlyer requesting donation of food to Feed My People. Drop off locations on the UWEC campus are listed: Davies, McIntyre Library, Phillips, AMH, Haymarket, Towers, and the Suites
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
The project also needs to continue. Do epigenetic marks established during egg development have effects even in mammalian stages? That is a very important question that needs answering, because the answer could have implications on how faithfully our lab model is representing what happens in nature.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
Speaking personally, my students have no interest in continuing to use intestines 🤣 ...but I might make them 🤷🏻‍♂️ We will see. I think this is an important conversation for the schistosome community to have.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
So, what now? There's a reason everyone works with parasites derived from liver - the intestines are a pain to work with and yield very few eggs. Anything that requires a few thousands miracidia, perhaps even life cycle maintenance, would involve hundreds to thousands of rodents if using intestines.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
Our next question was if these differences have effects on miracidia behavior (what we study). The answer is (unfortunately) yes. Most quantitative track features from unstimulated miracidia are different. Aggregated feature summaries show distinct clusters based on tissue origin as eggs.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
We wondered - do these differences dissipate over time? Are miracidia transcriptomes synchronized after hatching? The answer is no. Even after hatching and equilibrating at room temperature for a few hours, miracidia transcriptomes can still be distinguished by their tissue origin as eggs.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
Well, last year Peterková et al. showed that eggs derived from either the liver (dead end) or intestine (natural migration/excretion route) are transcriptomically *and* antigenically distinct. This was a very important finding. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
journals.plos.org
Winners vs. losers: Schistosoma mansoni intestinal and liver eggs exhibit striking differences in gene expression and immunogenicity
Author summary The egg of Schistosoma mansoni is the main causative agent of pathologies of chronic schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease with a significant global health burden. Pathology is ...
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
The problem is that the liver is a dead end for the schistosome life cycle. The reason we use liver eggs is entirely due to convenience - they accumulate there in the tens of thousands and hatch to miracidia that can competently infect snails, what's there to lose?
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
We work with schistosome miracidia, the larval stage that hatches from eggs after being excreted from the definitive host into water. Almost everyone who works with schistosomes use miracidia that were hatched from eggs derived from rodent liver.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/08/2025
I am pleased to present a project we've been working on for the least year to try to answer a fundamental question - does a parasite's developmental niche as an egg have effects on larval stages? We show that the answer is very much yes - which has a few implications. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Tissue-specific distribution of eggs in the definitive host drives transcriptomic and behavioral differences in Schistosoma mansoni miracidia
Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by human-infective schistosomes (Trematoda: Schistosoma). Intestinal schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa and the Neotropics is caused primarily...
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Reposted by Nic Wheeler
Tom Pennance @schistosoma.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
New research w/ @jacobphd.bsky.social et al. published today in Nature Communications: Genes linked to schistosome resistance identified in a genome-wide association study of African snail vectors doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🐌🪱🧬
doi.org
Genes linked to schistosome resistance identified in a genome-wide association study of African snail vectors - Nature Communications
A genome wide association study of an African vector of schistosomiasis revealed two genomic regions associated with resistance to Schistosoma mansoni. These findings will inform novel control strateg...
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 04/07/2025
Other than myself, ever single author of this manuscript is an undergraduate student. What a blast it is to work these inspiring students.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 04/07/2025
Along the way, we generated a few models for controlling snail (and thus human) schistosome infections that are completely novel, and we took the first small steps toward that ultimate goal. Seeing the basic biology provide a foundation for new translational approaches has been incredibly exciting.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 04/07/2025
Very excited and proud to release a project that I’ve been thinking about for at least 7 years, well before I started my faculty position. We built an imaging and computational platform from the ground up to help answer some outstanding questions in schistosome miracidia biology.
biorxiv.org
Quantitative ethology of schistosome miracidia characterizes a conserved snail peptide that inhibits penetration
Over 700 million people are at risk of contracting schistosomiasis due to regular exposure to freshwater sources where infected snails, the obligate intermediate hosts of schistosomes, are endemic. Al...
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 25/04/2025
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 25/04/2025
💻🧬🦟🪱
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 25/04/2025
Our annual Celebration of Scholarship and Creative Activity is a yearly highlight of mine. Proud of the students and their 5 poster presentations!
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 23/04/2025
Such an important resource. Subscribe with me!
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 08/04/2025
UWEC students won an unprecedented three (3!) Goldwater Scholarships this year, and our lab member Rachel was one of them! I’m so proud of Rachel’s development as a scientist and excited that she’s been recognized as a future leader. Check out the story on her award: www.uwec.edu/stories/firs...
uwec.edu
From first-gen transfer jitters to Goldwater Scholar: Rachel Horejsi
Rachel Horejsi Goldwater Award
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 24/03/2025
Now published at IJP:DDR! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
A graphical user interface for wrmXpress 2.0 streamlines helminth phenotypic screening
Image-based phenotypic screening is a fundamental technique used to better understand the basic biology of helminths and advance discovery of new anth…
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/03/2025
We have also now added a dedicated documentation website: wrmxpress-gui.readthedocs.io/latest/. The GUI runs in a browser and is easily installed through Docker Desktop. We've made it easy to download example data from our Zenodo repo, which allows users to see the pipelines in action.
wrmxpress-gui.readthedocs.io
wrmXpress-gui
Documentation for the wrmXpress GUI.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/03/2025
Additionally, the GUI was made possible by substantial updates to the backend by folks in the Zamanian lab (@zamanian.bsky.social). v2.0 is officially out: github.com/zamanianlab/.... It includes new segmentation and tracking algorithms and support for 384-well plates.
github.com
GitHub - zamanianlab/wrmXpress
Contribute to zamanianlab/wrmXpress development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/03/2025
The GUI design, code, and testing was done by *undergraduates* in my lab. I'm so proud of them and what they've produced.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/03/2025
Very excited to release the first project from my lab, an update of wrmXpress with a graphical user interface: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
A graphical user interface for wrmXpress 2.0 streamlines helminth phenotypic screening
Image-based phenotypic screening is a fundamental technique used to better understand the basic biology of helminths and advance discovery of new anthelmintics. Miniaturization of screening platforms ...
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 12/02/2025
We can probably point you in the right direction, depending on your experimental/video setup. Feel free to DM/email.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 08/02/2025
Where were you when the American biomedical research apparatus collapsed?
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/11/2024
Speaking of Google Chrome…as I do at least once a year, this week I tried to force myself to switch to Safari and yet once again failed because it just isn’t a very good piece of software.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 21/11/2024
Hi everyone! For those of us who have a lab website, it’s simple to use the website domain as your BSKY handle. It’s also possible to provide subdomains for other members of the lab. Checkout their instructions: bsky.social/about/blog/4...
bsky.social
How to set your domain as your handle - Bluesky
Using a domain as your handle helps with account identity, verification, and portability. Here's how to set your domain as your handle.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 19/11/2024
Hi! Are you using DESeq2? It was designed with this problem in mind (see Fig 2 from the 2014 Genome Biology paper). In their vignette, the authors recommend two pre-filtering strategies to remove lowly expressed genes prior to analysis (bioconductor.org/packages/dev...)
bioconductor.org
Analyzing RNA-seq data with DESeq2
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Reposted by Nic Wheeler
Abhinay Ramaprasad @abhinay.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
Trying to find my way around here. Have created a starter pack for parasitologists. Join, connect and spread the word! go.bsky.app/5UiPsYr
go.bsky.app
Parasitologists Unite
Join the conversation
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/11/2024
Printing custom arenas for behavioral assays with schistosome miracidia.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/11/2024
The best thing about research at a PUI is getting to do whatever I want. Excited to see how 3D printing capabilities broadens the types of experiments we can do.
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Nic Wheeler @wheelerlab.bio · 17/11/2024
👋🏻
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