Titre :

Mitochondrial genes support a common origin of rodent malaria parasites and Plasmodium falciparum's relatives infecting great apes

Auteur(s) :

Blanquart, Samuel [Auteur correspondant]
Goldman Group
Laboratoire d'Informatique de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier [LIRMM]
Bioinformatics and Sequence Analysis [BONSAI]
Gascuel, Olivier [Auteur]
Méthodes et Algorithmes pour la Bioinformatique [MAB]
Bioinformatics and Sequence Analysis [BONSAI]

Titre de la revue :

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Pagination :

70

Éditeur :

BioMed Central

Date de publication :

2011

ISSN :

1471-2148

Discipline(s) HAL :

Sciences de l'environnement/Biodiversité et Ecologie
Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]/Sciences agricoles

Résumé en anglais : [en]

Background<br /> Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the most acute form of human malaria. Most recent studies demonstrate that it belongs to a monophyletic lineage specialized in the infection of great ape hosts. ...
Lire la suite >Background<br /> Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the most acute form of human malaria. Most recent studies demonstrate that it belongs to a monophyletic lineage specialized in the infection of great ape hosts. Several other Plasmodium species cause human malaria. They all belong to another distinct lineage of parasites which infect a wider range of primate species. All known mammalian malaria parasites appear to be monophyletic. Their clade includes the two previous distinct lineages of parasites of primates and great apes, one lineage of rodent parasites, and presumably Hepatocystis species. Plasmodium falciparum and great ape parasites are commonly thought to be the sister-group of all other mammal-infecting malaria parasites. However, some studies supported contradictory origins and found parasites of great apes to be closer to those of rodents, or to those of other primates.<br />Results<br />To distinguish between these mutually exclusive hypotheses on the origin of Plasmodium falciparum and its great ape infecting relatives, we performed a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis based on a data set of three mitochondrial genes from 33 to 84 malaria parasites. We showed that malarial mitochondrial genes have evolved slowly and are compositionally homogeneous. We estimated their phylogenetic relationships using Bayesian and maximum-likelihood methods. Inferred trees were checked for their robustness to the (i) site selection, (ii) assumptions of various probabilistic models, and (iii) taxon sampling. Our results robustly support a common ancestry of rodent parasites and Plasmodium falciparum's relatives infecting great apes.<br />Conclusions<br />Our results refute the most common view of the origin of great ape malaria parasites, and instead demonstrate the robustness of a less well-established phylogenetic hypothesis, under which Plasmodium falciparum and its relatives infecting great apes are closely related to rodent parasites. This study sheds light on the evolutionary history of Plasmodium falciparum, a major issue for human health.Lire moins >

Langue :

Anglais

Comité de lecture :

Oui

Audience :

Internationale

Vulgarisation :

Non

Collections :

• Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille (CRIStAL) - UMR 9189

Source :

Harvested from HAL