PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Johannes S. P. Doehl
AU  - Helen Ashwin
AU  - Najmeeyah Brown
AU  - Audrey Romano
AU  - Samuel Carmichael
AU  - Jon W. Pitchford
AU  - Paul M. Kaye
TI  - Spatial point pattern analysis identifies mechanisms shaping the skin parasite landscape in <em>Leishmania donovani</em> infection
AID  - 10.1101/2021.05.07.443107
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.05.07.443107
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/07/2021.05.07.443107.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/07/2021.05.07.443107.full
AB  - Increasing evidence suggests that infectiousness of hosts carrying parasites of the Leishmania donovani complex, the causative agents of visceral leishmaniasis, is linked to parasite repositories in the host skin. This is particularly true for asymptomatic to moderately symptomatic hosts with no or minimally detectable parasitemia. However, a detailed description of the dispersal and dispersion of parasites and parasitized host phagocytes in the skin is still lacking. Here, we combined image analysis with spatial point pattern models borrowed from ecology, providing a new route to predicting modes of skin parasite dispersal and characterizing their dispersion. Our results suggest that, after initial parasite seeding in the skin, parasites form self-propagating networks of parasite patch clusters in the skin that may contribute to parasite outward transmission. This combination of imaging and ecological pattern analysis to identify mechanisms driving the skin parasite landscape offers new perspectives on parasitism by Leishmania donovani and may also be applicable to elucidating the behavior of other intracellular tissue-resident pathogens.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.