Recent Developments in Blastocystis Research

I would like to draw your attention to an open access link to our 2013 review on Recent Developments in Blastocystis Research; please go here to read/download the paper.

Here's the abstract:

Blastocystis is a common parasite of the human large intestine but has an uncertain role in disease. In this review, we appraise the published evidence addressing this and its weaknesses. Genetic diversity studies have led to the identification of numerous subtypes (STs) within the genus Blastocystis and, recently, methods for studying variation within STs have been developed, with implications for our understanding of host specificity. The geographic distribution of STs is summarised and the impact this may have on investigations into the role of the organism in disease is discussed. Finally, we describe the organelle and nuclear genome characteristics and look to future developments in the field.

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Advances in parasitology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published 10.1016/B978-0-12-407706-5.00001-0.

It has been a long time coming, and it was a great pleasure for me to co-author it.

For those who are interested there will also be a couple of open access review papers on Blastocystis appearing in Tropical Parasitology; you can read more here.

Reference:

Clark CG, van der Giezen M, Alfellani MA, & Stensvold CR (2013). Recent developments in Blastocystis research. Advances in parasitology, 82, 1-32 PMID: 23548084