Abstract
While disease and outbreaks are mainly clonal for bacteria and other asexually reproducing organisms, sexual reproduction in schistosomes and other helminths usually results in unique individuals. For sexually reproducing organisms, the traits conserved in clones will instead be conserved in the group of organisms that tends to breed together, the population. While the same tools are applied to characterize DNA, how results are interpreted can be quite different at times (see another article in this collection, http://www.asmscience.org/content/journal/microbiolspec/10.1128/microbiolspec.AME-0002-2018). It is difficult to know what the real effect any control program has on the parasite population without assessing the health of this population, how they respond to the control measure, and how they recover, if they do. This review, part of the Microbiology Spectrum Curated Collection: Advances in Molecular Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, concentrates on one approach using pooled samples to study schistosome populations and shows how this and other approaches have contributed to our understanding of this parasite family's biology and epidemiology. *This article is part of a curated collection.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.