HelmBank Release R1: DNA barcodes for wildlife parasites—now availableA 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. 🔗 Explore the releaseThe idea: wildlife conservation & public health programs need "field guides" for wildlife parasitesA modern field guide to the diversity of parasites that infect and sometimes sicken tropical wildlife is needed so that wildlife veterinarians, conservation practitioners, and public servants can do their jobs effectively. Emerging technologies that enable DNA-based monitoring provide the tools we need to detect parasites from feces, tissues, and environmental samples—and this is a great start. The problem is that those detections only provide us actionable information that is as good as the reference sequences they can match, which in many cases is not very good. For wildlife helminths in the tropical Americas, reference resources are still thin. HelmBank is our attempt to fix that by connecting genetic information about parasitic helminths to the animals they might infect. The information chain is structured like this: Host species → parasite specimens → expert identifications → DNA barcodes → GIS integration → open data releases It’s a biodiversity project, a wildlife health project, and a One Health project all in one—because we recognize that host–parasite interactions don’t stop at the border between protected areas, ranchlands, and towns. What’s under production now: a growing roster of hosts—and the parasites they carryHelmBank’s collection currently includes more than 100 parasite specimens collected from a rapidly expanding set of Neotropical mammals. That host breadth is the point: if you want DNA barcodes to work for parasitology in the real world, they need to reflect parasites originating across the range of hosts and regions where people actually sample. The "who’s who" of wildlife hosts (so far): A remarkable array of tropical mammals that spans the Americas.
The host list will keep expanding as sampling enters an exponential phase of growth. Every new host species drives us to figure out what kinds of new parasites we could discover in the next species, and what that could mean for our understanding of wildlife health and biodiversity around the world. Now the parasite side of the story: “How many new species will we find?” Our working collection already spans the major helminth lineages.
And we’re still in the early stages. As sequencing catches up to our exponentially growing collection of specimens, and as our identifications of these specimens are refined, we are already making important discoveries:
HelmBank Release R1: an early public dataset you can use and explore nowWe are initiating a phased release of HelmBank involving versioned updates, so the resource can grow and be used without sacrificing reliability. Hosts in Release R1 HelmBank Release R1 includes 45 DNA barcodes from 20 sequenced specimens linked to a focused set of hosts spanning multiple mammal lineages:
Parasites in Release R1 R1’s parasites are mostly nematodes (roundworms), plus a really new and interesting tapeworm, including multiple helminth families:
The collaborations powering HelmBank and why they matter HelmBank is succeeding so quickly because we are approaching it as a team effort. We’re grateful to be building HelmBank with a strong, international, and professionally diverse array of collaborators and partners across institutions such as:Together, these partnerships connect wildlife rescue and veterinary contexts, conservation research, and field ecology with the lab and data pipelines needed to make specimen data reusable as open reference resources.     Diverse support for a diverse biodiversity project HelmBank has been supported by a range of funders and programs that span research, training, and conservation impact: This mix matters: it’s what allows the project to stay open, rigorous, and grounded in real-world applications as it grows. Events and engagement: HelmCamps, the Chaco, and conservation at the front line
The people leading & improving the workHelmBank is also a training engine. Current and recent students are advancing toward becoming veterinarians, earning higher degrees, and entering the workforce. Along the way, students and staff are continuously improving our specimen workflows, lab methods, and data releases, including
The network behind HelmBank: field to lab, across the Americas
HelmBank is built by a collaborator network that connects community partners, conservation organizations, academic researchers, park rangers, wildlife veterinarians, parasitologists, students, and data scientists—because high-quality parasite reference data can only exist when specimens, knowledge of the animals that host them, and well-organized workflows. In Argentina, our work began in the Chaco dry forest with local families who made the first field campaigns possible—sharing ethno-ecological knowledge, helping us navigate the working landscape responsibly, and acting as trusted nodes with the broader community network. That foundation grew into long-term collaboration with provincial park rangers who support field logistics, maintain surveillance networks for opportunistic sampling, and protect wildlife in the same landscapes where our research is happening. In Argentina’s Atlantic Forest of Misiones, HelmBank has been strengthened by collaboration involving experienced parasitologists who bring their deep taxonomic expertise needed for reliable identifications—turning “a worm” into a name that can anchor a DNA reference record. Those efforts now feed directly into training and knowledge transfer through our HelmCamp workshop series. In Costa Rica, partnerships with Organization for Tropical Studies at La Selva Biological Station, the Sloth Conservation Foundation, and wildlife rescue and hospital networks connect parasitology to real wildlife health realities: clinical cases, necropsies, and carefully preserved specimens collected by experienced veterinary teams. These collaborations not only expand host and geographic diversity, but also help refine protocols so data are comparable across sites and usable for One Health and veterinary questions. What makes this network so special is its range: it spans protected areas and multi-use forests, rescue centers and research stations, and it includes both the people who can safely and ethically obtain specimens and those who can perform the necropsies, verify identifications, and build reusable data products. By the numbers: our collaborative efforts have been concentrated in Argentina and Costa Rica, but our programs are rapidly expanding with growing connections to Colombia as well as organizations in the United States. What’s next: more hosts, more parasites—and a bigger geographic reachAs progress with HelmBank accelerates, upcoming releases will grow in two directions at once: 1. More wildlife hosts, which means more chances to find new species and unexpected host-parasite linkages 2. Higher-resolution IDs as verification and sequencing catch up with the collection. At the same time, new priority efforts will grow in prominence. A key goal is to make HelmBank increasingly useful for geographic (GIS) analyses—mapping how parasite communities change with host diversity, habitat, land use, climate, and so on. We’re excited to strengthen this work in collaboration with Dr. Seda Şalap-Ayça from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, whose expertise in GIS and spatial analysis will help us begin to translate HelmBank data into landscape-level insights. Because the long-term question isn’t just how many parasites exist—it’s also: where do they live, how are their ranges changing, and what does that mean for wildlife and people? Explore HelmBank | Get Involved
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