Schistosome population genetic structure: when clumping worms is not just splitting hairs

Schistosomiasis is a major public health problem, affecting over 200 million people worldwide. Although Schistosoma mansoni has been studied rigorously in an attempt to provide a vaccine based on a number of candidate antigens, there has been a lack of complementary effort to determine the range and distribution of variation in representative molecules throughout natural populations. Here, Jason Curtis and Dennis Minchella highlight current (and suggest future) research efforts aimed at assessing genetic variation in schistosome populations, and call for a more robust consideration of schistosome population genetics.