As a result of a recent large-scale global survey, tapeworms, a class which encompasses more than 5,000 species, are now one of the most well-known groups of multi-cellular parasites.
University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Janine Caira, and her colleagues Elizabeth Jockusch and Jill Wegrzyn at UConn, and UConn alumna Kirsten Jensen, now on the faculty of the University of Kansas, have received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to tackle some of the questions raised by the team’s earlier survey work.
The generation of a robust phylogenetic framework for the major lineages of tapeworms is a key interest for the group; the researchers then hope to use this “backbone” to revise the higher classifications of the group. more