A new Kartzinel Lab data release, built with partners across Central and South America, is creating the reference tools needed to identify parasitic worms (helminths) that infect wildlife using DNA barcoding. HelmBank links expertly identified and voucher-backed parasite specimens to host species and geographic data—so conservation biologists, wildlife veterinarians, and molecular ecologists can translate parasite detections from sick or free-ranging animals into reliable data.

First public release of HelmBank strengthens parasite detection for Neotropical mammals
Release R1 publishes 45 parasite DNA barcode sequences, drawn from a larger working collection of more than 100 specimens. Hosts represented across HelmBank already include big cats (ocelot, jaguar, puma), foxes, tapirs, peccaries, sloths, armadillos, anteaters, and opossums—a cross-section of wildlife central to conservation and wildlife health programs across the region.

Why this matters for conservation, wildlife health, and One Health
DNA-based monitoring is increasingly used to study diets, microbiomes, and pathogens—but parasites are often left out because reference datasets are missing or too geographically mismatched to support confident identification. HelmBank is designed to close that gap by building a rigorously curated "field guide" for molecular parasitology—improving comparability across studies and strengthening our ability to monitor disease risk, which is especially important for both conservation and public health in areas where wildlife, livestock, and humans share landscapes.

One of the top “unsolved problems” in biology is the need to untangle complex networks of species interactions - perhaps nowhere is this more consequential than our need to grapple with the socioecological risks of neglected tropical diseases. Human-livestock-wildlife parasite transmission has been declared a major biomedical challenge for the 21st century with reasons for concern that include the potential for zoonotic helminths—parasitic worms such as nematodes (roundworms), cestodes (tapeworms), and trematodes (flukes) to be transmitted between humans and animals. The effects cause malnutrition, developmental delays, and deaths that disproportionately affect communities undergoing rapid development.

A critical problem is that our strategies to identify and track wildlife parasites originated to combat livestock diseases a century ago. We know very little about how to answer the question: What parasites infect tropical wildlife? We know far more about the subset of parasites that harm humans and livestock than all others. Consequently, our conservation partners struggle to identify the parasites they encounter, hindering our collective efforts to rehabilitate endangered species, evaluate emerging health threats, and treat diseases.

Fortunately, we have just received a Catalyst award from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society to pursue new strategies in the field of Molecular Parasitology 🏆

A new paper from the Kartzinel Lab is the first to compare the parasites of wild two- and three-toed sloths living in both primary forests and urban habitats. Led by Ezequiel Vanderhoeven, the paper Host specificity of gastrointestinal parasites in free-ranging sloths from Costa Rica was published in partnership with our friends at Sloth Conservation Foundation.