ArticlePLoS computational biology2016
Quantifying Transmission Investment in Malaria Parasites.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Plastic responses ofBiology letters · 2025Article
- Malaria parasites can optimize transmission investment by sensing two within-host cues.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Declines in prevalence alter the optimal level of sexual investment for the malaria parasiteProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Immune selection suppresses the emergence of drug resistance in malaria parasites but facilitates its spread.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- The private life of malaria parasites: Strategies for sexual reproduction.Molecular and biochemical parasitology · 2021Review
- Increased investment in gametocytes in asymptomatic Plasmodium falciparum infections in the wet season.BMC infectious diseases · 2021Article
- Uncovering drivers of dose-dependence and individual variation in malaria infection outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Testing possible causes of gametocyte reduction in temporally out-of-synch malaria infections.Malaria journal · 2020Article
- Adaptive phenotypic plasticity in malaria parasites is not constrained by previous responses to environmental change.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2019Article
- Adaptive plasticity in the gametocyte conversion rate of malaria parasites.PLoS pathogens · 2018Article
- Transmission of molecularly undetectable circulating parasite clones leads to high infection complexity in mosquitoes post feeding.International journal for parasitology · 2018Article
- Altered life history strategies protect malaria parasites against drugs.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- Transmission traits of malaria parasites within the mosquito: Genetic variation, phenotypic plasticity, and consequences for control.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- Adaptation of Plasmodium falciparum to its transmission environment.Nature ecology & evolution · 2018Article
- Phenotypic plasticity in reproductive effort: malaria parasites respond to resource availability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Predicting optimal transmission investment in malaria parasites.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- Associations between Season and Gametocyte Dynamics in Chronic Plasmodium falciparum Infections.PloS one · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Many microparasites infect new hosts with specialized life stages, requiring a subset of the parasite population to forgo proliferation and develop into transmission forms. Transmission stage production influences infectivity, host exploitation, and the impact of medical interventions like drug treatment. Predicting how parasites will respond to public health efforts on both epidemiological and evolutionary timescales requires understanding transmission strategies. These strategies can rarely be observed directly and must typically be inferred from infection dynamics. Using malaria as a case study, we test previously described methods for inferring transmission stage investment against simulated data generated with a model of within-host infection dynamics, where the true transmission investment is known. We show that existing methods are inadequate and potentially very misleading. The key difficulty lies in separating transmission stages produced by different generations of parasites. We develop a new approach that performs much better on simulated data. Applying this approach to real data from mice infected with a single Plasmodium chabaudi strain, we estimate that transmission investment varies from zero to 20%, with evidence for variable investment over time in some hosts, but not others. These patterns suggest that, even in experimental infections where host genetics and other environmental factors are controlled, parasites may exhibit remarkably different patterns of transmission investment.
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