Joanna Cielocha
Rockhurst University, MO·Ecology & Evolution
Parasites are everywhere in nature, and they can strongly shape the lives of the animals they live in. Gregarines are single-celled parasites related to the organisms that cause malaria and coccidiosis, a serious intestinal disease of animals.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
gregarines
apicomplexa
parasites
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Collect grasshoppers and the gregarine parasites inside them on six expeditions to sites in the Western United States, a region where no insect gregarines have been sampled before.
- Discover and formally describe new gregarine species living in western grasshoppers, using morphological study of body structure together with molecular DNA analysis.
- Measure variation in gregarine appearance (phenotype) and genes (genotype) across the grasshopper hosts' geographic range. This would be the first such study for gregarines from insect hosts.
- Test whether gregarines are strictly specific to one host species or instead specific to an ecosystem, by combining morphological and molecular data from parasites collected across hosts and sites.
More about the research
Unlike those relatives, gregarines do not infect animals with backbones. Instead, they live in invertebrates such as earthworms, shrimp and insects. Only about 1,600 gregarine species are known, which is likely less than 1% of those that exist. No gregarines have ever been collected from any insect group west of the Rocky Mountains.
Why it matters
Gregarine diversity in the American West is almost entirely unknown. This work will add many newly described parasite species and show how host-parasite relationships are organized across landscapes. That knowledge improves understanding of biodiversity and of parasites related to disease-causing groups. Community events at a Kansas City nature center will also teach the public about parasite life cycles and conservation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gustavo Hormiga
George Washington University, DC·Ecology & Evolution
Discover and formally describe new Neotropical velvet worm species in the family Peripatidae, combining high-throughput sequence data with modern morphological techniques to estimate the region's true species diversity.
Dorota Porazinska
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Describe new species of freshwater nematodes in the families Tobrilidae, Plectidae and Monhysteridae from Nebraska Sandhills aquatic habitats, using body-shape (morphological) analysis and DNA barcoding of individual specimens.
Anthony Amend
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Ecology & Evolution
Isolate and formally describe hundreds of new Pucciniomycotina yeasts from Hawaiian plant, animal and environmental samples and from zoo animals, using genome sequencing, physiological data and culture traits.
The school
Rockhurst University: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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