Tropes

ScienceDaily_2013 05066.txt

#Scientists find soaring variety of malaria parasites in batsresearchers have discovered a surprising diversity of malaria parasites in West african bats as well as new evidence of evolutionary jumps to rodent hosts. Led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural history the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and the Museum fuì r Naturkunde Berlin the new study reveals that two bat-infecting parasites are closely related to parasites in rodents that are used commonly to model human malaria in laboratory studies. The results will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bats which are important reservoir hosts for many pathogens particularly viruses have been hosts to malaria parasites for more than a century said coauthor Susan Perkins an associate curator in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Understanding the evolution of malaria parasites in bats and other animals and how they fit into the tree of life is key to understanding this important human disease. Malaria is caused by a handful of species of parasites in the Genus plasmodium through the bite of mosquitos and remains a widespread vector-borne infectious disease sickening almost half a billion people every year around the planet. Experimental research on drugs immunology and the development of malaria is done typically on related Plasmodium species that infect rodents including laboratory-reared mice. The parasites'natural hosts are African thicket rats that use shrubs and trees as habitat. To further investigate how bats fit into this picture the researchers surveyed more than 250 bats in remote forest ecosystems in Liberia Guinea and Cote d'ivoire in Western Africa. They found a vast diversity of malaria parasites that included not just theplasmodium species but also members of three other genera. The DNA from several genes of the bat parasites was sequenced at the Museum's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics resulting in the most comprehensive evolutionary tree of life for malaria parasites of bats to date. The authors report that two parasites Plasmodium voltaicum and Plasmodium cyclopsi show patterns of evolutionary jumps from the rodent lineage into bats and then likely a reverse jump with a bat parasite reinfecting rodent hosts. The authors suggest that the bat hosts which roost in trees may have been exposed to the same mosquito vectors that transfer the parasites between the tree-dwelling rodent hosts. It is unknown what the physiological effects of the parasites are on the bats but the high diversity of parasites as well as the high proportion of individuals that are infected with the parasites suggest that this may be yet another example of the unusually high tolerance of these flying mammals for pathogens said co-author Juliane Schaer a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and the Museum fuì r Naturkunde Berlin. Other work has suggested that the evolution of flight may have triggered parallel strengthening of the immune system of bats and may explain why they are able to host viruses such as Ebola rabies and the recently discovered Middle east Respiratory system (MERS) virus which are highly pathogenic to other mammals including humans. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Museum of Natural history. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference r

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