Just One Cross Appears Capable of Dramatically Altering the Population Biology of a Eukaryotic Pathogen Like Toxoplasma Gondii.
From: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Publish Date: Jul 2006
- ISSN: 0027-8424
- Volume: 103
- Issue: 27
- Pages: 10514-9
- Medium: Print
- Language: English
- Citation (JAMA): Boyle Jon P, Rajasekar Badri, Saeij Jeroen P J, et al. Just One Cross Appears Capable of Dramatically Altering the Population Biology of a Eukaryotic Pathogen Like Toxoplasma Gondii.. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Jul 2006;103:10514-9
Abstract
Toxoplasma gondii, an obligate intracellular protozoan of the phylum Apicomplexa, is estimated to infect over a billion people worldwide as well as a great many other mammalian and avian hosts. Despite this ubiquity, the vast majority of human infections in Europe and North America are thought to be due to only three genotypes. Using a genome-wide analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, we have constructed a genealogy for these three lines. The data indicate that types I and III are second- and first-generation offspring, respectively, of a cross between a type II strain and one of two ancestral strains. An extant T. gondii strain (P89) appears to be the modern descendant of the non-type II parent of type III, making the full genealogy of the type III clonotype known. The simplicity of this family tree demonstrates that even a single cross can lead to the emergence and dominance of a new clonal genotype that completely alters the population biology of a sexual pathogen.
Mesh Headings (Keywords): Animals, Chromosomes, Crosses, Genetic, Female, Genome, Protozoan, Male, Molecular Sequence Data, Phylogeny, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide, Toxoplasma
Check for Full Text / PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID): 16801557
This abstract is part of PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed includes more than 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles. See Copyright and Disclaimers.
Linked medical terms appearing on this page are added by Healia to help readers find more information and are not part of the original PubMed document.
The data herein was last updated on July 8th, 2008 and may not reflect the most current and accurate data available from NLM.