Host-Protist Interactions: Integrating molecular mechanisms to Ecology, Evolution and Disease Progression

Protists are highly diverse eukaryotic microorganisms that occupy nearly every environment and play key roles in ecological balance, as free-living species, symbionts, and pathogens of medical, veterinary, and agricultural importance. While many protists are beneficial or commensal, numerous parasitic protists cause major infectious diseases in humans and animals, including malaria, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, toxoplasmosis, amoebiasis, and cryptosporidiosis; imposing substantial global health and socioeconomic burdens, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Successful infection depends on complex interactions between invading protists and host immune systems. Host cells deploy innate-adaptive immune mechanisms to detect, restrict, and eliminate invading parasites, whereas protists evolve diverse strategies to evade recognition, manipulating host signaling pathways, cellular metabolism, and establish persistent infections. Advances in immunology, molecular biology, and multi-omics are revealing dynamic host-protist interfaces across tissues, hosts, and ecosystems. Integration with ecological and evolutionary perspectives is crucial to understand how protist-host interactions drive disease emergence, persistence, and transmission.This Research Topic aims to provide a comprehensive platform for recent advances in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing host-protist immune interactions. We seek studies that elucidate how hosts recognize protist pathogens, activate protective immune responses, and coordinate innate and adaptive immunity, as well as investigations into the diverse strategies protists use to evade, suppress, or exploit host defenses. We particularly encourage mechanistic studies on host receptors, intracellular signaling pathways, immune cell communication, parasite-derived virulence factors, antigenic variation, metabolic reprogramming, extracellular vesicles, and tissue-specific immune responses. Contributions employing innovative approaches, including single-cell and spatial omics, systems immunology, organoid models, advanced imaging, and computational analyses, are especially welcome. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary work that bridges protist biology, immunology, ecology, evolution, and clinical research, and we welcome both hypothesis-driven mechanistic studies and synthetic contributions such as reviews, perspectives, and methods papers.By integrating fundamental discoveries with translational research, this collection aims to advance our understanding of disease pathogenesis and identify new opportunities for vaccine development, immunotherapy, diagnostics, and targeted interventions against protist infections.We welcome submissions of Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Methods, Perspectives, and Opinion articles on, but not limited to, the following themes:• Protist cell biology, and genome biology.• Molecular mechanisms of host invasion, intracellular survival, and transmission.• Role of innate and adaptive immunity in host-mediated recognition of protists: pattern-recognition receptors, cytokine signaling, innate immune cells, T-cell and B-cell responses.• Immune evasion, immune modulation, and host immune exploitation by parasitic protists.• Roles of parasite surface molecules, secreted effectors, extracellular vesicles, and antigenic variation in host-parasite interactions.• Tissue-specific interactions and immunometabolism in microenvironments.• Emerging technologies for studying host-protist interactions: single-cell omics, spatial biology, multi-omics integration, systems biology, organoid models, genome editing, advanced imaging, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence-based approaches.• Translational novel therapeutic studies focusing on biomarkers, vaccine development, immunotherapies, host-directed therapies, antimicrobial resistance, diagnosis, and treatment of protist-associated diseases.We encourage interdisciplinary contributions that link mechanistic insight to ecology, evolution, and clinical impact. Topic editors: Debanjan Sarkar, Adreeja Basu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83856/host-protist-interactions-integrating-molecular-mechanisms-to-ecology-evolution-and-disease-progression