Parasite Course: Concepts in Parasitology (Australia)

For those interested:

There will be a two-week specialist course for PhD students and earlycareer researchers (ECRs), 

run by the Australian Society for Parasitology (ASP) called Concepts in Parasitology.
  
The course is running again this year from the 25^th of November to the 8^th of December 2019 in New South Wales (Kioloa Coastal Campus), and the deadline for applications is the 13^th of July 2019. 

Details of the course are here.

Where Are We On Blastocystis Subtypes?

As mentioned, Blastocystis exhibits remarkable intrageneric diversity, which is continuously being explored by us and our colleagues. We are convinced that the genus of Blastocystis comprises multiple species, but for now we call them "ribosomal lineages" or "subtypes" and allocate numbers to each subtype, hence ST1, ST2, etc. While the number of subtypes that can be found in humans remains stable, we and our colleagues are still expanding the subtype universe in non-human hosts (I will be blogging on this shortly).

Barcoding currently represents state-of-the-art in Blastocystis subtyping, and luckily this method appears to gain a foothold in labs across the world.

Nine subtypes have been found in humans, but some of them only on rare occasions. A recent study going out from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and led by Dr Alfellani and published just now in Acta Tropica looked at 356 Blastocystis sequences from samples from the UK and Libya, but also from sub-Saharan Africa, namely Liberia and Nigeria.