Interactions among parasites in snails create cascading effects on their transmission and highlight that biodiversity has complex, context-dependent and important effects on human schistosomiasis transmission dynamics.

Cells that give rise to the infectious form of parasitic flatworms called schistosomes show similar patterns of gene expression to stem cells in free-living flatworms.

Neither the presence nor the intensity of Hematodinium sp. parasitisation drives co-infection occurrence, severity, or diversity in the ecologically ubiquitous shore crab, Carcinus maenas.

The absence of helminth parasites in developed countries may be exacerbating pathological, age-associated inflammation, known as inflammaging, suggesting that helminth therapies could provide protection against age-related disease.

A newly described isolate of the behavior-manipulating fly pathogen Entomophthora muscae that naturally infects fruit flies can be cultured in the lab, enabling molecular investigation of how microbes induce behavior changes in animal hosts.

A coordinated humoral immune response that includes recognition, effector and cytotoxic factors engages the cell-mediated immune response to defend a snail against infection by schistosome parasites.

Physiological porphyrin biosynthesis causes photosensitivity in fasted planarians, providing an experimentally tractable animal model of acute porphyrias.

Temperature variation caused by heatwaves and diurnal fluctuations has distinct effects on host and pathogen traits at different mean temperatures, leading to large and unexpected differences in disease burden making the impact of global warming on diseases hard to predict.

A region of the Biomphalaria genome, containing highly divergent haplotypes with different combinations of transmembrane genes, strongly impacts whether these snails can transmit parasitic schistosomes.