ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Evolution of a morphological novelty occurred before genome compaction in a lineage of extreme parasites.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 66 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
66 citing papers in PubMed, 137 citations in OpenAlex.
- Microsporidia: evolution, infection mechanisms and host impact.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Phylogenetic ancestry of Metamonada proteins points to a common origin of mitochondria in all eukaryotes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Comprehensive analysis of small GTPases in Microsporidia reveals new extremes in eukaryotic cell biology.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Enzymology of the metazoan tRNA ligase complex: a lifetime in cycles.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2026Review
- Comparative mitogenomics of kingdom Fungi - evolutionary insights and metagenomic applications.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Intersections between proteostasis and immunity: insights from Caenorhabditis elegans.Disease models & mechanisms · 2026Review
- Variation in Genome Architecture and Epigenetic Modification Across the Microsporidia Phylogeny.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- An Irish cocktail of flatworm, earthworm and parasite DNAs: genomics of invasive land flatworms (Geoplanidae) reveal infestations by two new Mitosporidium species (Microsporidia).Parasite (Paris, France) · 2025Article
- Article
- Functional characterization of Nosema bombycis (microsporidia) trehalase 3.Parasitology research · 2023Article
- Single-cell genomics reveals new rozellid lineages and supports their sister relationship to Microsporidia.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Review
- Genomic and phenotypic evolution of nematode-infecting microsporidia.PLoS pathogens · 2023Article
- Population genetic analysis of the microsporidium Ordospora colligata reveals the role of natural selection and phylogeography on its extremely compact and reduced genome.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Morphological characterization and genetic diversity of a new microsporidium,Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2023Article
- Intraspecific genetic diversity of the fish-infecting microsporidian parasiteFrontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Lineage and role in integrative taxonomy of a heterotrophic orchid complex.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- Adaptation to genome decay in the structure of the smallest eukaryotic ribosome.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Impact of Genome Reduction in Microsporidia.Experientia supplementum (2012) · 2022Article
- Insights from C. elegans into Microsporidia Biology and Host-Pathogen Relationships.Experientia supplementum (2012) · 2022Review
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Intracellular parasitism results in extreme adaptations, whose evolutionary history is difficult to understand, because the parasites and their known free-living relatives are so divergent from one another. Microsporidia are intracellular parasites of humans and other animals, which evolved highly specialized morphological structures, but also extreme physiologic and genomic simplification. They are suggested to be an early-diverging branch on the fungal tree, but comparisons to other species are difficult because their rates of molecular evolution are exceptionally high. Mitochondria in microsporidia have degenerated into organelles called mitosomes, which have lost a genome and the ability to produce ATP. Here we describe a gut parasite of the crustacean Daphnia that despite having remarkable morphological similarity to the microsporidia, has retained genomic features of its fungal ancestors. This parasite, which we name Mitosporidium daphniae gen. et sp. nov., possesses a mitochondrial genome including genes for oxidative phosphorylation, yet a spore stage with a highly specialized infection apparatus--the polar tube--uniquely known only from microsporidia. Phylogenomics places M. daphniae at the root of the microsporidia. A comparative genomic analysis suggests that the reduction in energy metabolism, a prominent feature of microsporidian evolution, was preceded by a reduction in the machinery controlling cell cycle, DNA recombination, repair, and gene expression. These data show that the morphological features unique to M. daphniae and other microsporidia were already present before the lineage evolved the extreme host metabolic dependence and loss of mitochondrial respiration for which microsporidia are well known.
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