Editorial: Intraspecies variability in apicomplexan parasites: epidemiology, traits and virulence

Author contributions DA-S: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. DM: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Funding The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. DA-S is funded by the César Nombela research grant (2023-T1/BIO-28962)from the Atracción de talento de la Comunidad de Madrid program. DM is funded by a Start Up research grant (SRG) from SERB, Govt. of India SRG/2022/001381. Conflict of interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision. ; Single cell eukaryotic obligate intracellular apicomplexan parasites are major cause of life-threatening infections in humans (Plasmodium spp., Toxoplasma gondii, Cryptosporidium spp.) and cause significant effect on cattle and poultry industries Neospora caninum and Eimeria spp.) that leads to massive global economic loss every year. The outcome of infection and pathogenesis by apicomplexan parasites are largely dependent on the host and the parasite strain genotypes (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020). In the current ‘omics’ era, with large datasets and new technologies frequently developed, the challenge is to combine these datasets to better understand the biological mechanisms by which parasites infect hosts and cause diseases, emphasizing the identification of key proteins that could be targeted for therapeutic or immunoprophylactic interventions. Due to the advent of the newer ‘game-changer’ methodologies, especially the CRISPR-Cas systems and the multi-omics driven approaches (whole genome sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.), identification of newer strains and genotype-phenotype correlations became easier (Seeber and Steinfelder, ...