Overview
- Published in Cell, the analysis concludes mites and ticks arose in two separate clades: Acariformes and Parasitiformes.
- Researchers compared the physical order of genes across chromosomes in 90 arachnid genomes, the largest dataset of its kind.
- The project was led by Dr. Siddharth Kulkarni at CSIR–CCMB with three undergraduate co-authors from IISER Thiruvananthapuram.
- The results illuminate how parasitic traits emerged and diversified over more than 100 million years.
- The authors say the clarified phylogeny can strengthen early-warning systems and targeted control by predicting likely disease vectors as distributions shift.