Malaria is a devastating disease, affecting 200 million people worldwide and causing more than 600 000 deaths each year. In the past decade, great inroads have been made in reducing the number of infections, primarily through the implementation of insecticide-laced bed nets, and also reducing the death rate with combination therapies. However the emergence of drug-resistant malaria is rendering these therapies less effective, and there is an urgent need to develop novel therapies to cure malaria.

Background information on reasons for a parasite cleanse and simple guide to administering a herbal parasite cleanse.

Recommendation on a Parasite Cleansing Kit containing a variety of herbs that make your body inhospitable to parasites and herbal laxatives.

Welcome back, everyone, to a new episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast! Like every week, we’re here to talk about the latest SEO news for publishers, inspire you with some stories about our side hustles, and shock you with…

The post Runaway Parasite SEO! Google Penalizes Forbes! appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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Many wild southern sea otters in California are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, yet the infection is fatal for only a fraction of sea otters, which has long puzzled the scientific community. A National Science Foundation-funded study identifies the parasite's specific strains that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds. The study marks the first time a genetic link has been clearly established between the Toxoplasma strains in felid hosts and parasites causing fatal disease in marine wildlife. The study's results highlight how infectious agents like Toxoplasma can spread from cat feces on land to the sea, leading to detrimental impacts on marine wildlife.

Image credit: Trina Wood/UC Davis

Malaria is a life-threatening disease commonly transmitted by mosquitos. Symptoms include fever, chills, vomiting, headaches, abdominal pain, and rapid hea

People often contract schistosomiasis through water contaminated with infected snails and feces.

Scientists modified Toxoplasma gondii to deliver a potential Rett Syndrome therapeutic to the mouse brain. 

Researchers found that Toxoplasma gondii increased the host cell’s metabolic activity, offering insights into potential treatment strategies. 

I'm trying to find a story published on Clarkes World or tor.com or something similar, in the last ~15 years? A woman protagonist is on an exoplanet, and we become aware that she's being transformed by a parasite from the planet, but her experience of it is expansive and euphoric. I think it explicitly mentions the tongue-eating louse, though I could be misremembering that bit.

The life cycle of malaria parasites in both their mammalian host and mosquito vector consists of multiple developmental stages that ensure proper replication and progeny survival. The transition between these stages is fueled by nutrients scavenged from the host and fed into specialized metabolic pathways of the parasite. One such pathway is used by Plasmodium falciparum, which causes the most severe form of human malaria, to synthesize its major phospholipids, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine, and phosphatidylserine. Much is known about the enzymes involved in the synthesis of these phospholipids, and recent advances in genetic engineering, single-cell RNA-Seq analyses, and drug screening have provided new perspectives on the importance of some of these enzymes in parasite development and sexual differentiation and have identified targets for the development of new antimalarial drugs. This Minireview focuses on two phospholipid biosynthesis enzymes of P. falciparum that catalyze phosphoethanolamine transmethylation (PfPMT) and phosphatidylserine decarboxylation (PfPSD) during the blood stages of the parasite. We also discuss our current understanding of the biochemical, structural, and biological functions of these enzymes and highlight efforts to use them as antimalarial drug targets.

Jianhua Wang
Nov 4, 2020; 0:RA120.002375v1-mcp.RA120.002375
Research

Malaria elimination is still pending on the development of novel tools that rely on a deep understanding of parasite biology. Proteins of all living cells undergo a myriad number of posttranslational modifications (PTMs) that are critical to multifarious life processes. An extensive proteome-wide dissection revealed a fine PTM map of most proteins in both Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of severe malaria, and the infected red blood cells. More than two-thirds of proteins of the parasite and its host cell underwent extensive and dynamic modification throughout the erythrocytic developmental stage. PTMs critically modulate the virulence factors involved in the host-parasite interaction and pathogenesis. Furthermore, P. falciparum stabilized the supporting proteins of erythrocyte origin by selective de-modification. Collectively, our multiple omic analyses, apart from having furthered a deep understanding of the systems biology of P. falciparum and malaria pathogenesis, provide a valuable resource for mining new antimalarial targets.

Pathogens are more common in polar bears living in the Chukchi Sea now than they were three decades ago, a new study suggests—but it's not yet clear what that means for the mammals' health

Title: Pious Parasites: Medieval Monks Battled Nasty Gut Germs
Category: Health News
Created: 8/19/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/19/2022 12:00:00 AM

Around 25 per cent of the world’s population has intestinal parasite infections – these could hinder the effectiveness of covid-19 vaccines, according to research in mice

Imagine you’re a baby cocoa plant, just unfurling your first tentative roots into the fertile, welcoming soil.

Somewhere nearby, a predator stirs. It has no ears to hear you, no eyes to see you. But it knows where you are, thanks in part to the weak electric field emitted by your roots.

It is microscopic, but it’s not alone. By the thousands, the creatures converge, slithering through the waterlogged soil, propelled by their flagella. If they reach you, they will use fungal-like hyphae to penetrate and devour you from the inside. They’re getting closer. You’re a plant. You have no legs. There’s no escape.

But just before they fall upon you, they hesitate. They seem confused. Then, en masse, they swarm off in a different direction, lured by a more attractive electric field. You are safe. And they will soon be dead.

If Eleonora Moratto and Giovanni Sena get their way, this is the future of crop pathogen control.

Many variables are involved in the global food crisis, but among the worst are the pests that devastate food crops, ruining up to 40 percent of their yield before they can be harvested. One of these—the little protist in the example above, an oomycete formally known as Phytophthora palmivora—has a US $1 billion appetite for economic staples like cocoa, palm, and rubber.

There is currently no chemical defense that can vanquish these creatures without poisoning the rest of the (often beneficial) organisms living in the soil. So Moratto, Sena, and their colleagues at Sena’s group at Imperial College London settled on a non-traditional approach: They exploited P. palmivora’s electric sense, which can be spoofed.

All plant roots that have been measured to date generate external ion flux, which translates into a very weak electric field. Decades of evidence suggests that this signal is an important target for predators’ navigation systems. However, it remains a matter of some debate how much their predators rely on plants’ electrical signatures to locate them, as opposed to chemical or mechanical information. Last year, Moratto and Sena’s group found that P. palmivora spores are attracted to the positive electrode of a cell generating current densities of 1 ampere per square meter. “The spores followed the electric field,” says Sena, suggesting that a similar mechanism helps them find natural bioelectric fields emitted by roots in the soil.

That got the researchers wondering: Might such an artificial electric field override the protists’ other sensory inputs, and scramble their compasses as they tried to use plant roots’ much weaker electrical output?

To test the idea, the researchers developed two ways to protect plant roots using a constant vertical electric field. They cultivated two common snacks for P. palmivora—a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and a legume often used as a livestock feed plant—in tubes in a hydroponic solution.

Two electric-field configurations were tested: A “global” vertical field [left] and a field generated by two small nearby electrodes. The global field proved to be slightly more effective.Eleonora Moratto

In the first assay, the researchers sandwiched the plant roots between rows of electrodes above and below, which completely engulfed them in a “global” vertical field. For the second set, the field was generated using two small electrodes a short distance away from the plant, creating current densities on the order of 10 A/m². Then they unleashed the protists.

With respect to the control group, both methods successfully diverted a significant portion of the predators away from the plant roots. They swarmed the positive electrode, where—since zoospores can’t survive for longer than about 2 to 3 hours without a host—they presumably starved to death. Or worse. Neil Gow, whose research presented some of the first evidence for zoospore electrosensing, has other theories about their fate. “Applied electrical fields generate toxic products and steep pH gradients near and around the electrodes due to the electrolysis of water,” he says. “The tropism towards the electrode might be followed by killing or immobilization due to the induced pH gradients.”

Not only did the technique prevent infestation, but some evidence indicates that it may also mitigate existing infections. The researchers published their results in August in Scientific Reports.

The global electric field was marginally more successful than the local. However, it would be harder to translate from lab conditions into a (literal) field trial in soil. The local electric field setup would be easy to replicate: “All you have to do is stick the little plug into the soil next to the crop you want to protect,” says Sena.

Moratto and Sena say this is a proof of concept that demonstrates a basis for a new, pesticide-free way to protect food crops. (Sena likens the technique to the decoys used by fighter jets to draw away incoming missiles by mimicking the signals of the original target.) They are now looking for funding to expand the project. The first step is testing the local setup in soil; the next is to test the approach on Phytophthora infestans, a meaner, scarier cousin of P. palmivora.

P. infestans attacks a more varied diet of crops—you may be familiar with its work during the Irish potato famine. The close genetic similarities imply another promising candidate for electrical pest control. This investigation, however, may require more funding. P. infestans research can be undertaken only under more stringent laboratory security protocols.

The work at Imperial ties into the broader—and somewhat charged—debate around electrostatic ecology; that is, the extent to which creatures including ticks make use of heretofore poorly understood electrical mechanisms to orient themselves and in other ways enhance their survival. “Most people still aren’t aware that naturally occurring electricity can play an ecological role,” says Sam England, a behavioral ecologist with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. “So I suspect that once these electrical phenomena become more well known and understood, they will inspire a greater number of practical applications like this one.”

Highlights: Scientists found Toxoplasma gondii may help deliver therapeutic proteins to the brain, a breakthrou

New 'copy-paste' mechanism in genetics have been identified by researchers at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in a malaria parasite

Doctors treating infections such as HIV are bewildered when Neglected Tropical Diseases are thrown in the mix.

A long-standing mystery of how a protein displayed on the surface of malaria parasites called "TRAP" interacts with human host cells has now been found.

One such parasite lurks in Chesapeake Bay: an invasive barnacle that hijacks a mud crab’s reproductive system and impregnates it with parasite larvae—even if the crab is male.

The post Undersea parasite turns male mud crabs female appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

A newly-discovered species of ant supports a controversial theory of species formation. The ant, known to live only under a single eucalyptus tree on the […]

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Through sheer coincidence, two Smithsonian researchers at the National Zoological Park have discovered that 18 percent of the white-tailed deer population in the Eastern United […]

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Mark Torchin, a marine ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, talks about how he studies the parasites of invasive marine animals such as snails. Much of his research focuses on biological invasions and the dynamics between the host, the parasites and the surrounding ecosystem.

The post Meet our Scientist–Mark Torchin tracks invasive marine species and their parasites in Panama appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, lionfish in the Atlantic and pythons in the Everglades: Large creatures like these generally draw the spotlight when talking […]

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The Earth’s changing climate could cause the extinction of up to a third of its parasite species by 2070, according to a global analysis reported […]

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Many wild southern sea otters in California are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, yet the infection is fatal for only a fraction of sea otters, which has long puzzled the scientific community. A National Science Foundation-funded study identifies the parasite's specific strains that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds. The study marks the first time a genetic link has been clearly established between the Toxoplasma strains in felid hosts and parasites causing fatal disease in marine wildlife. The study's results highlight how infectious agents like Toxoplasma can spread from cat feces on land to the sea, leading to detrimental impacts on marine wildlife.

Image credit: Trina Wood/UC Davis

A drug used to treat parasite infections at fish farms can contaminate the surrounding environment and threaten local wildlife, a new study shows. Following a week-long treatment at a Norwegian salmon farm, the authors found concentrations of an anti-sea-lice drug that were high enough to kill some crabs, shrimps and lobsters. However, they suggest the drug is not likely to pose a risk to humans.

Wild finches in the Galapagos made famous by Charles Darwin 'self-fumigate' their nests using human-made pesticides.

New research supports the hypothesis that parasites could have a role in preventing certain diseases.

From chinstrap penguins to cuckoo bees, these kleptomaniac parasites rob their fellow critters for food and supplies.

Methods for removing parasites and in particular ectoparasites of vertebrates, in particular of mammals, and compositions for the implementation of this method.Methods for removing parasites of vertebrates, and in particular arthropods, mainly insects and Arachnida, wherein an effectively parasiticidal amount of a compound of formula (I) ##STR1## in particular of fipronil, is administered to the animal via an administration route which makes possible systemic distribution and good absorption.

The Korean film Parasite, about a lower-class family who con their way into a wealthy household, wins in a year dominated by social issues.

Researchers find a common disease in honey bees can be transmitted to native bees through flowers, causing them to die about three times the rate of the normal mortality.

Researchers swap lab coats for waders and wellies in a quest to battle a tiny parasite that threatens the $150 million dollar tuna industry.

The feces contain the oldest example of parasite DNA ever recorded.

If an international film, like 'Parasite,' wins best picture, it only seems fair that a different film, like 'Pain and Glory,' gets the international Oscar.

Bong Joon Ho's mesmerizing movie deserves to win best picture. But can it?

Predicting the four acting races for the 2020 Oscars is easy this year, but there's still drama in the best picture race and others

A historic best director Oscar goes to 'Parasite' filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, the first Korean winner and only the second time the prize has gone to a film not in English.

"Parasite" won the Oscar for best picture, becoming the first non-English language movie to do so. How did it win?

With "Parasite," the academy gave best picture to the actual best picture. It also made history.

When the Oscars telecast tried to cut off the "Parasite" team's speech after winning best picture, the audience rallied to let them continue.

Ava DuVernay, Olivia Munn and Jon M. Chu were among the celebs celebrating "Parasite's" historic win for best picture at the 2020 Oscars.

"Parasite" won four Oscars, including best picture, and emotions ran high among the film's supporters, particularly for director Bong Joon Ho's wife.

More than film critics or a more international film academy, Netflix has proved that subtitles are a bridge, not a barrier.

Oscar's big winner, 'Parasite,' and war tale '1917' show how interactive entertainment is shaping linear storytelling — often for the better.

Feelings about Oscar "In Memoriam" snubs from Luke Perry to "Lolita's" Sue Lyon, plus the best picture win for "Parasite," Kirk Douglas remembrances and lingering thoughts about Shakira and Jennifer Lopez at the Super Bowl.