Two major phyla are responsible for human disease: Nemathelminthes (roundworms) and Platyhelminthes (flatworms). Nematodes are categorized by their migration route. Enterobius and Trichuris are found intraintestinally, whereas filarial worms live in tissue and lymphatics. Platyhelminthes is further divided into two classes: cestodes, or tapeworms; and trematodes, or flukes. Nemathelminthes (Rou...

Platyhelminthes (flatworms) have captivated the imagination of biologists for centuries. Indeed, planarian flatworms were used as experimental models decades before Caenorhabditis elegans became known as 'the worm'. Although planarians experienced a brief fall from grace, with the advent of molecular tools, planarians, such as Schmidtea mediterranea, have emerged in recent years as powerful mod...

Since first described, acoels were considered members of the flatworms (Platyhelminthes). However, no clear synapomorphies among the three large flatworm taxa -- the Catenulida, the Acoelomorpha and the Rhabditophora -- have been characterized to date. Molecular phylogenies, on the other hand, commonly positioned acoels separate from other flatworms. Accordingly, our own multi-locus phylogeneti...

In most zoological textbooks, Platyhelminthes are depicted as an early-emerging clade forming the likely sister group of all the other Bilateria. Other phylogenetic proposals see them either as the sister group of most of the Protostomia or as a group derived from protostome coelomate ancestors by progenesis. The main difficulty in their correct phylogenetic placing is the lack of convincing sy...

Background. The selenocysteine(Sec)-containing proteins, selenoproteins, are an important group of proteins present in all three kingdoms of life. Although the selenoproteomes of many organisms have been analyzed, systematic studies on selenoproteins in platyhelminthes are still lacking. Moreover, comparison of selenoproteomes between free-living and parasitic animals is rarely studied. Results...

The fossil record of parasitic helminths is often stated to be severely limited. Many studies have therefore used host constraints constrain molecular divergence time estimates helminths. Here we review direct evidence for several these lineages belong various phyla (Acanthocephala, Annelida, Arthropoda, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Platyhelminthes). Our compilation shows that the soft-bodied patchy...

Histones from the parasitic platyhelminthes, Echinococcus granulosus and Fasciola hepatica, were systematically characterized. Core histones H2A, H2B, H3 and H4, which were identified on the basis of amino acid sequencing and mass spectrometry data, showed conserved electrophoretic patterns. Histones H1, identified on the basis of physicochemical properties, amino acid composition and amino aci...

Recent studies on microRNA (miRNA) evolution focused mainly on the comparison of miRNA complements between animal clades. However, evolution of miRNAs within such groups is poorly explored despite the availability of comparable data that in some cases lack only a few key taxa. For flatworms (Platyhelminthes), miRNA complements are available for some free-living flatworms and all major parasitic...