Fellow Publishes Paper on the Co-Evolution of Mites and Humans

One of this year’s Global Change Fellows, Megan Thoemmes, is a co-author of a new paper, Global divergence of the human follicle mite Demodex folliculorum: Persistent associations between host ancestry and mite lineages, in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. It is a landmark paper which shows that people of different ancestry carry different subgroups of the mites, and that their distribution throughout the global population may even reflect how our species has migrated and evolved over the course of history.
Significance:
Mites live in human hair follicles and have been implicated in medically important skin disorders, but we know surprisingly little about these residents of our skin. By analyzing the variation segregating among 241 mite sequences isolated from 70 human hosts, we showed that hosts with different regional ancestries harbor distinct lineages of mites and that these associations can persist despite generations spent in a new geographic region. These results suggest that some mite populations are better able to survive and reproduce on hosts from certain geographic regions. Improving our understanding of human follicle mites promises to shed light on human evolution and to provide important contextual information for their role in human health.
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