A Texas A&M research team will decode the full genomes of thousands of New World screwworms collected during an outbreak in Honduras, in a two-year project meant to show how the parasite spreads and whether it is developing resistance to treatments, the university's College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences announced Wednesday.
The work is backed by about $4 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's New World Screwworm Grand Challenge. Scientists at the veterinary college are leading it, working alongside Texas A&M AgriLife and Honduran animal health officials.
Screwworm larvae eat living flesh in the open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including cattle, horses, pets, wildlife and people. The fly was driven out of the U.S. in an eradication campaign that started in the 1950s, but cases climbed again in Panama in 2021 and 2022, and the outbreak moved north until it reached the U.S. in June 2026, according to the university.
What the team plans
Honduras' National Service of Agricultural Health and Food Safety will share samples gathered throughout that country's outbreak, along with records of when and where each was collected, which animal was infested and, in some cases, how it was treated. The partnership grew out of a trip Honduran officials made to the College Station campus late in 2025.
Guilherme Verocai, an associate professor who directs the college's Parasitology Diagnostic Laboratory, leads the project. His co-investigators are Brian Davis, Rafael Ramos and Sarah Hamer. The team will run its comparisons on the university's high performance computing systems.
