The deadly neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (TTX) is found in a variety of animal phyla and, because of its toxicity, is most often assumed to deter predation. On the tropical Pacific island of Guam, we found an undescribed flatworm (planocerid sp. 1) that contains high levels of TTX and its analogs. Through ecological experiments, we show that TTXs do not protect these flatworms from some predators but...

Schistosoma haematobium is one of the most prevalent parasitic flatworms, infecting over 112 million people in Africa. However, little is known about the genetic diversity of natural S. haematobium populations from the human host because of the inaccessible location of adult worms in the host. We used 4 microsatellite loci to genotype individually pooled S. haematobium eggs directly from each p...

The full scope of regulatory RNA evolution and function in epigenetic processes is still not well understood. The development of planarian flatworms to be used as a simple model organism for research has shown a great potential to address gaps in the knowledge in this field of study. The genomes of planarians encode a wide array of regulatory RNAs that function in gene regulation. Here, we revi...

Schistosoma genomes provide a comprehensive resource for identifying the molecular processes that shape parasite evolution and for discovering novel chemotherapeutic or immunoprophylactic targets. Here, we demonstrate how intragenus and intergenus comparative genomics can be used to drive these investigations forward, illustrate the advantages and limitations of these approaches and review how ...

Primitive platyhelminths, especially Acoel turbellarians, are thought to be key to understanding the origin and evolution of metazoa. In order to infer their phylogenetic position within the phylum Platyhelminths, we determined and compared the complete nucleotide sequence of a region of about 750 base pairs in the central part of an 18S rDNA for ten turbellarians, including two species of the ...

Parthenogenetic lineages that arise in a hermaphroditic, sexual population will inherit the male function from their sexual progenitors. Natural selection then acts to reduce male allocation of the parthenogens, freeing resources presumably for the female function. Depending on age and the available genetic variation, one therefore expects to find reduced male allocation in naturally occurring ...

rebecca j. rundell and brian s. leander Department of Zoology, Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Program in Integrated Microbial Diversity, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z4 Canada, Department of Environmental and Forest Biology, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, New Yor...

A new species of the genus Dugesia is described from the Lake Ohrid region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula, forming the first fully documented species description for this genus in the Ohrid area. The morphological species delimitation is supported by complementary molecular, karyological, and cytogenetic data available from the literature. Therefore, species delineation is based on...