Significant numbers of pre-school children are infected with Schistosoma mansoni in sub-Saharan Africa and are likely to play a role in parasite transmission. However, they are currently excluded from control programmes. Molecular phylogenetic studies have provided insights into the evolutionary origins and transmission dynamics of S. mansoni, but there has been no research into schistosome mol...

Ecosystem functioning, characterized by components such as productivity and stability, has been extensively linked with diversity in recent years, mainly in plant ecology. The aim of our study was thus to quantify general relationships between diversity, community structure and ecosystem functions in metazoan parasite communities. We used data on parasite communities from 15 species of marine f...

Parasites comprise a substantial portion of total biodiversity. Ultimately, this means that host extinction could result in many secondary extinctions of obligate parasites and potentially alter host-parasite network structure. Here, we examined a highly resolved fish-parasite network to determine key hosts responsible for maintaining parasite diversity and network structure (quantified here as...

The development of molecular tools and phylogenetic methods have contributed to the explosion of taxonomic and phylogenetic investigations on parasites (both microand macroparasites, i.e. from viruses, bacteria, protists to arthropods and helminths), increasing our knowledge of considerable, and often cryptic, parasitic diversity. Concomitantly, the studies of host–parasite interactions and par...

BACKGROUND Parasites significantly alter topological metrics describing food web structure, yet few studies have explored the relationship between food web topology and parasite diversity. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS This study uses quantitative metrics describing network structure to investigate the relationship between the topology of the host food web and parasite diversity. Food webs were ...

Why does the severity of parasite infection differ dramatically across habitats? This question remains challenging to answer because multiple correlated pathways drive disease. Here, we examined habitat-disease links through direct effects on parasites and indirect effects on parasite predators (zooplankton), host diversity and key life stages of hosts. We used a case study of amphibian hosts a...

Host species richness and parasite species richness are often positively correlated, but the strength of this relationship varies from study to study. What accounts for this variability? Here, we explore the role of spatial scale in mediating the commonly reported positive relationship between host and parasite diversity. Building from ecological theory, we lay out a series of hypotheses for ho...

BACKGROUND Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) is a severe helminth disease affecting humans, which is caused by the fox tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis. AE represents a serious public health issue in larger regions of China, Siberia, and other regions in Asia. In Europe, a significant increase in prevalence since the 1990s is not only affecting the historically documented endemic area north of t...

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) encode proteins that recognize foreign antigens and are thus crucial for immune response. In a population of a single host species, parasite-mediated selection drives MHC allelic diversity. However, in a community-wide context, species interactions may modulate selection regimes because the prevalence of a given parasite in a given host may de...

Motivated by observations in DNA data of the human cytomegalovirus, we study the dynamics and the maintenance of diversity in a hierarchical model of a two-type parasite population distributed over its (infected) hosts. The parasite is assumed to be capable to persist in its host and to reinfect other hosts, and balancing selection is assumed to maintain diversity within hosts. For a suitable p...