Estimating helminth burdens using sibship reconstruction

Statistical method for estimating female worm burdens from data on the number of unique female parental genotypes derived from sibship reconstruction

Abstract

Sibship reconstruction is a form of parentage analysis that can be used to identify the number of helminth parental genotypes infecting individual hosts using genetic data on only their offspring. This has the potential to be used for estimating individual worm burdens when adult parasites are otherwise inaccessible, the case for many of the most globally important human helminthiases and neglected tropical diseases. Yet methods of inferring worm burdens from sibship reconstruction data on numbers of unique parental genotypes are lacking, limiting the method’s scope of application.

We developed a novel statistical method for estimating female worm burdens from data on the number of unique female parental genotypes derived from sibship reconstruction.

This is a publication arising from the Zoonoses and Emerging Livestock Systems (ZELS) programme.

Citation

Neves M, Webster J, Walker M (2019). Estimating helminth burdens using sibship reconstruction. Parasit Vectors. 12(1):441.

Estimating helminth burdens using sibship reconstruction

Updates to this page

Published 16 September 2019