Projects per year
Abstract / Description of output
Undertaking certain activities at the time of day that maximises fitness is assumed to explain the evolution of circadian clocks. Organisms often use daily environmental cues such as light and food availability to set the timing of their clocks. These cues may be the environmental rhythms that ultimately determine fitness, act as proxies for the timing of less tractable ultimate drivers, or are used simply to maintain internal synchrony. While many pathogens/parasites undertake rhythmic activities, both the proximate and ultimate drivers of their rhythms are poorly understood. Explaining the roles of rhythms in infections offers avenues for novel interventions to interfere with parasite fitness and reduce the severity and spread of disease. Here, we perturb several rhythms in the hosts of malaria parasites to investigate why parasites align their rhythmic replication to the host’s feeding-fasting rhythm. We manipulated host rhythms governed by light, food, or both, and assessed the fitness implications for parasites, and the consequences for hosts, to test which host rhythms represent ultimate drivers of the parasite’s rhythm. We found that alignment with the host’s light-driven rhythms did not affect parasite fitness metrics. In contrast, aligning with the timing of feeding-fasting rhythms may be beneficial for the parasite, but only when the host possess a functional canonical circadian clock. Because parasites in clock-disrupted hosts align with the host’s feeding-fasting rhythms and yet derive no apparent benefit, our results suggest cue(s) from host food act as a proxy rather than being a key selective driver of the parasite’s rhythm. Alternatively, parasite rhythmicity may only be beneficial because it promotes synchrony between parasite cells and/or allows parasites to align to the biting rhythms of vectors. Our results also suggest that interventions can disrupt parasite rhythms by targeting the proxies or the selective factors driving them without impacting host health.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e13752 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Evolutionary Applications |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 7 |
Early online date | 14 Jul 2024 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2024 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Fitness proxies
- circadian rhythm
- Plasmodium
- intra-erythrocytic development cycle
- fitness
- virulence
- transmission
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Dive into the research topics of 'Testing the evolutionary drivers of malaria parasite rhythms and their consequences for host-parasite interactions'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Parasite offence or host defence? The roles of biological rhythms in malaria infection
1/11/16 → 30/09/23
Project: Research
Datasets
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Testing the evolutionary drivers of malaria parasite rhythms and their consequences for host-parasite interactions
Holland, J. (Creator), Reece, S. (Creator), Prior, K. (Creator) & O'Donnell, A. (Creator), Edinburgh DataShare, 28 Jun 2024
DOI: 10.7488/ds/7762
Dataset