ReviewParasite immunology2022
Hijacking time: How Ophiocordyceps fungi could be using ant host clocks to manipulate behavior.
Review in Parasite immunology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Blade-running: an efficient yet simple behaviour to potentially combat summit disease in ants.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Circadian clock is critical for fungal pathogenesis by regulating zinc starvation response and secondary metabolism.Science advances · 2025Article
- Toll-1-dependent immune evasion induced by fungal infection leads to cell loss in the Drosophila brain.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Parasitism by Entomopathogenic Fungi and Insect Host Defense Strategies.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- Time to start taking time seriously: how to investigate unexpected biological rhythms within infectious disease research.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Circadian rhythms: pervasive, and often times evasive.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Insect circadian plasticity as a proposed target for the expression of parasite extended phenotypes.Npj biological timing and sleep · 2025Review
- The caterpillar Manduca sexta brain shows changes in gene expression and protein abundance correlating with parasitic manipulation of behaviour.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Viral- and fungal-mediated behavioral manipulation of hosts: summit disease.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2024Review
- With the dead under the mat: the zombie ant extended phenotype under a new perspective.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2024Article
- Signatures of transposon-mediated genome inflation, host specialization, and photoentrainment ineLife · 2024Article
- Signatures of transposon-mediated genome inflation, host specialization, and photoentrainment inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Clockwork intruders: Do parasites manipulate their hosts' circadian rhythms?Current research in parasitology & vector-borne diseases · 2024Review
- Multiomic interpretation of fungus-infected ant metabolomes during manipulated summit disease.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Using machine learning to predict protein-protein interactions between a zombie ant fungus and its carpenter ant host.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Manipulative neuroparasites: uncovering the intricacies of neurological host control.Archives of microbiology · 2023Review
- Hijacking time: How Ophiocordyceps fungi could be using ant host clocks to manipulate behavior.Parasite immunology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ophiocordyceps fungi manipulate ant behaviour as a transmission strategy. Conspicuous changes in the daily timing of disease phenotypes suggest that Ophiocordyceps and other manipulators could be hijacking the host clock. We discuss the available data that support the notion that Ophiocordyceps fungi could be hijacking ant host clocks and consider how altering daily behavioural rhythms could benefit the fungal infection cycle. By reviewing time-course transcriptomics data for the parasite and the host, we argue that Ophiocordyceps has a light-entrainable clock that might drive daily expression of candidate manipulation genes. Moreover, ant rhythms are seemingly highly plastic and involved in behavioural division of labour, which could make them susceptible to parasite hijacking. To provisionally test whether the expression of ant behavioural plasticity and rhythmicity genes could be affected by fungal manipulation, we performed a gene co-expression network analysis on ant time-course data and linked it to available behavioural manipulation data. We found that behavioural plasticity genes reside in the same modules as those affected during fungal manipulation. These modules showed significant connectivity with rhythmic gene modules, suggesting that Ophiocordyceps could be indirectly affecting the expression of those genes as well.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.