Concluding remarks

Abstract

In 1884, the Russian protistologist Vassily Danilewsky described intraerythrocytic parasites in the blood of birds, highlighting that these parasites resembled the human malaria parasites described by Laveran few years before. Since then, bird haemosporidians have represented an excellent model for the study of host-parasite interactions. For many years, important advances in medical parasitology and malaria research, as well as other ecological, evolutionary, genetic, and immunological investigations, have been possible thanks to avian haemosporidian models. The field has exponentially grown during the past 20 years with the development of molecular methods, showing that genetic diversity of these parasites is greater than their morphological diversity, thus providing new insights into the taxonomy and biology of these pathogens. However, far from losing validity, investigations using traditional microscopy methodologies are still essential for the correct diagnoses and for understanding life history characteristics and biodiversity of this group. Although bird haemosporidians have been intensively studied in many temperate countries, the tropical and subtropical zoogeographical regions have considerably received less attention, thus constituting a significant gap in our knowledge and a priority for research. This is the origin and starting point of this volume. In these concluding remarks, we will recapitulate and point out the main items discussed across the synthesis and conceptual chapters presented in this book.