New work out! face mites!

Demodex folliculorum mites, members of the arachnid class, inhabit the skin of (almost) all humans and other mammals. They spend their whole lives as living as symbionts, cannot survive outside their host, and rarely have the opp. to outbreed. Sounds familiar? You’re right! just like bacterial endosymbionts do!

We found the genome of Demodex folliculorum holds several features of historical and ongoing genome reduction: 1) small compact genome, 2) widespread relaxed selection on genes, and 3) a staggering low amount of CDSs. In addition, rearrangement and changes in their Hox genes likely impacts their unique body plan such as the anterior and dorsal position of the penis and lack of segmentation. Lastly, the work shows Demodex is generally vertically transmitted and it indeed has an anus! and therefore have been wrongly blamed for many skin diseases attributed to the accumulation of faeces during their lifetime before release when Demodex died. This collaborative work has been published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

*Version of record: 10.1093/molbev/msac125

*** EDIT *** This work was also featured in a number of media outlets, among them EurekAlert! (AAAS), BBC, The Guardian, COSMOS, IFL Science, BIG Think, New York Post, Discover, The Telegraph, NPR, National Geographic España, Le Monde, Der Standard, APA, FOCUS, ORF, Krone, and Spektrum.