Summary of select parasitic diseases and their causal organism.

Parasites cause important human and animal diseases and have unique biological and experimental challenges that have made interpretation of in vivo and in vitro data challenging. Several examples are shown. Current treatments and associated observed drug resistance are noted. Many well-studied parasites remain refractory to genetic modification and/or still have poor genome annotation. ‘Uncharacterized’ genes were identified via EuPathDB searches for terms such as ‘uncharacterized’, ‘putative’, ‘hypothetical’, etc., for a representative strain. Because each database is heavily influenced by the respective scientific community, some databases such as CryptoDB do not use these terms because the function of so few genes have been validated in the Cryptosporidium parasites. Thus, the genomes of the Cryptosporidium parasites are mostly hypothetical and proposed functions are only putative; the reported percent of genome that is hypothetical is low for this reason (highlighted by an asterisk).