Despite their ubiquity, in most cases little is known about the impact of eukaryotic parasites on their mammalian hosts. Comparative approaches provide a powerful method to investigate the impact of parasites on host ecology and evolution, though two issues are critical for such efforts: controlling for variation in methods of identifying parasites and incorporating heterogeneity in sampling effort across host species. To address these issues, there is a need for standardized methods to catalogue eukaryotic parasite diversity across broad phylogenetic host ranges. We demonstrate the feasibility of a metabarcoding approach for describing parasite communities by analysing faecal samples from 11 nonhuman primate species representing divergent lineages of the primate phylogeny and the full range of sampling effort (i.e. from no parasites reported in the literature to the best-studied primates). We detected a number of parasite families and regardless of prior sampling effort, metabarcoding of only ten faecal samples identified parasite families previously undescribed in each host (x̅ = 8.5 new families per species). We found more overlap between parasite families detected with metabarcoding and published literature when more research effort-measured as the number of publications-had been conducted on the host species' parasites. More closely related primates and those from the same continent had more similar parasite communities, highlighting the biological relevance of sampling even a small number of hosts. Collectively, results demonstrate that metabarcoding methods are sensitive and powerful enough to standardize studies of eukaryotic parasite communities across host species, providing essential new tools for macroecological studies of parasitism.

中文翻译：

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真核生物寄生虫群落的metabarcoding描述了跨越灵长类动物系统发育的各种寄生虫组合。

尽管它们无处不在，但在大多数情况下，对于真核寄生虫对其哺乳动物宿主的影响知之甚少。比较方法为研究寄生虫对寄主生态和进化的影响提供了一种有力的方法，尽管对于此类工作至关重要的有两个问题：控制鉴定寄生虫的方法的变化以及将异质性纳入整个寄主物种的抽样工作中。为了解决这些问题，需要一种标准化的方法来对广泛的系统发育宿主范围内的真核寄生虫多样性进行分类。我们通过分析11种非人类灵长类物种的粪便样本（代表灵长类系统发育的不同谱系和全方位的采样工作），证明了描述寄生虫群落的元条形码方法的可行性。从文献中没有报道的寄生虫到研究最好的灵长类动物）。我们检测到许多寄生虫科，并且不管先前的取样工作如何，仅对十个粪便样品的metabarcoding识别出以前在每个宿主中未描述的寄生虫科（x = =每个物种8.5个新科）。当对寄主物种的寄生虫进行了更多的研究工作（以出版物数量作为衡量标准）时，我们发现用元条形码检测到的寄生虫家族与已发表的文献之间存在更多的重叠。亲缘关系更密切的灵长类动物和来自同一大陆的灵长类动物具有更多相似的寄生虫群落，这突出说明了即使是少数宿主，也具有采样的生物学意义。总的来说，