Fine Lit­er­a­ture: Non-ver­te­brate Mod­els of Patho­gen­e­sis

by Elio

To our list of re­view ar­ti­cles that we find ex­cep­tion­ally in­teresting, we add one by My­lon­akis, Casade­vall, and Au­subel on in­ver­te­brates as model sys­tems for the study of fun­gal patho­gen­e­sis. There is some­thing es­pe­cially ap­pealing about us­ing in­sects, ne­ma­todes, slime molds, and pro­to­zoa to study in­ter­ac­tions that have tra­di­tion­ally fo­cused on ver­te­brate hosts. No won­der this is fascinat­ing: so many of the path­o­genic mech­a­nisms, for exam­ple, vir­u­lence fac­tors, are sim­i­lar or the same across vast tax­o­nomic land­scapes. Surely, this says some­thing about the evo­lu­tion of such mech­a­nisms.

C. al­bi­cans out­grow­ing from dead C. ele­gans. Source