Drosophila melanogaster Meigen, 1830 has served as a model insect for over a century. Sequencing of the 11 additional Drosophila Fallen, 1823 species marks substantial progress in comparative genomics of this genus. By comparison, practically nothing is known about the genome size or genome sequences of parasitic wasps of Drosophila. Here, we present the first comparative analysis of genome siz...

In proovigenic parasitoids such as Leptopilina boulardi, the female emerges with a limited egg load and no further eggs are produced during its adult life. A female thus runs the risk of exhausting this limited supply of eggs before the end of her life. Given that the production of an egg is costly, what is the evolutionarily stable egg load at emergence? This question has attracted a lot of at...

As parasites coevolve with their hosts, they can evolve counter-defenses that render host immune responses ineffective. These counter-defenses are more likely to evolve in specialist parasites than generalist parasites; the latter face variable selection pressures between the different hosts they infect. Natural populations of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster are commonly threatened by end...

Occurrence of intraspecific variation in parasite virulence, a prerequisite for coevolution of hosts and parasites, has largely been reported. However, surprisingly little is known of the molecular bases of this variation in eukaryotic parasites, with the exception of the antigenic variation used by immune-evading parasites of mammals. The present work aims to address this question in immune su...