Parasitic organisms have independently evolved in every major lineage of
life on Earth, but despite both the medical, economic and agricultural
impacts of parasites, very little is known about the process by which a
species adopts a parasitic life style. Although researchers have
characterized many of the cellular and genomic consequences of anciently
derived parasites, such as Phytophthora (Irish potato blight) and
Plasmodium (the causative agent of malaria), changes that occur in the
initial stages of this evolutionary trajectory remain a mystery. The
primary barrier to understanding early parasite evolution has been the
difficulty in finding parasites with closely related free-living
lineages with which to make comparisons. The Lane Lab focuses on genome
evolution and reduction in parasites. We are currently exploring two
systems, oomycetes and red algae, to better understand the effect that
becoming a parasite has on the parasite’s g enomes.
