A modern menagerie of mammalian malaria

Malaria parasites belong to the diverse apicomplexan order Haemospororida and use a variety of vertebrate and dipteran hosts worldwide. Recently, the utilization of molecular methods has resulted in a burst of newly discovered and rediscovered taxa infecting mammalian hosts, particularly in apes, ungulates, and bats. Additional study of these diverse mammal-infecting taxa is crucial for better understanding the evolutionary history of malaria parasites, especially given that most previous comparative phylogenetic analyses have tended to use both limited taxon sampling and a small set of genetic loci, resulting in weakly supported (and sometimes hotly contested) hypotheses. The ability to generate genomic data from these mammalian parasites, even from subpatent infections, will open up exciting prospects for research on malaria parasites.