The Immune and Non-Immune Pathways That Drive Chronic Gastrointestinal Helminth Burdens in the Wild.

ABSTRACT: Parasitic helminths are extremely resilient in their ability to maintain chronic infection burdens despite (or maybe because of) their hosts' immune response. Explaining how parasites maintain these lifelong infections, identifying the protective immune mechanisms that regulate helminth infection burdens, and designing prophylactics and therapeutics that combat helminth infection, while preserving host health requires a far better understanding of how the immune system functions in natural habitats than we have at present. It is, therefore, necessary to complement mechanistic laboratory-based studies with studies on wild populations and their natural parasite communities. Unfortunately, the relative paucity of immunological tools for non-model species has held these types of studies back.

SUBMITTER: Babayan SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5807686 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature