Trypanosoma are a nasty class of single-celled parasites that cause serious, even fatal, diseases in human and animals. Two species cause sleeping sickness, a disease that threatens all of sub–Saharan Africa. There’s a catch though: one parasite, Trypanosoma brucei brucei (T. b. brucei), infects animals but seems to spare humans, and scientists haven’t quite understood why.

IRD researchers showed that Epinephilus maculates, a fairly abundant species of grouper off New Caledonia, was parasitized by 12 species of microscopic monogenean worms. This diversity of parasites has just been confirmed also in the malabar grouper, Epinephilus malabaricus, another the coral reef species.

Scientists at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology have for the first time recorded the entire genomic expression of both a host bacterium and an infecting virus over the eight-hour course of infection.

Funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, scientists at Binghamton University, State University of New York, hope to understand how the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum evolved resistance to the once-effective medication chloroquine.

Ivermectin, the standard drug for treating river blindness (onchocerciasis), is causing genetic changes in the parasite that causes the disease, according to a new study by Roger Prichard (McGill University, Canada) and colleagues, published on August 30, 2007 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Cooperation is widespread in the natural world but so too are cheats – mutants that do not contribute to the collective good but simply reap the benefits of others’ cooperative efforts.

An international team of scientists from Canada (Universitй Laval), the U.K. (University of Hull, Cardiff University) and Spain (Doтana Biological Station), have discovered that a pair of closely related species of East African cichlid fishes – a group of fish whose diversity comprising hundreds of species has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades – evolved divergent immune gene adaptations which might explain why they do not interbreed, despite living side by side.

The CRESIB has today presented the research programme on malaria by Plasmodium vivax, a parasite causing over 70 million yearly cases of malaria in the world. This new programme will be developed in coordination with the leading international centres and researchers on P.vivax.

A defense molecule isolated in ticks infected with the Babesia sp. parasite may protect animals and humans against infection. Researchers from the U.S. and abroad report their findings in the July 2007 issue of the journal Infection and Immunity.

Across the southern United States, an invisible, yet deadly parasite known as the root-knot nematode is crippling soybean crops. While plant breeders are racing to develop cultivars resistant to the root-knot nematode, they are being slowed down by current time-consuming and expensive methods of screening for resistant plants.

The good news, if you're grazing normally on algae in the rocky intertidal zone of the North Atlantic, is that you may not be infected by a parasite. But the better news is, according to new research from the University of New Hampshire, that you might have more to eat if plenty of your neighbors are infected.

The parasite that leads to sleeping sickness can be lulled to sleep itself using a newly discovered pathway, according to research published online this week in EMBO reports. Trypanosoma brucei is a parasite that causes sleeping sickness resulting in neurological damage and death.