Editorial: Systems Biology of Hosts, Parasites and Vectors

Systems Biology of Hosts, Parasites and VectorsParasites cause significant morbidity and mortality in humans, livestock, and companion animals, imposing major challenges for public and veterinary health, and the food industry, worldwide.Parasitic diseases are influenced by a wide range of factors that add complexity to the understanding of the host-parasite-vector triad.A thorough knowledge of parasite biology, and of the interactions between these pathogens and their vertebrate and/or invertebrate hosts is key to discover and develop novel and sustainable strategies to reduce infection burden and assist elimination.Systems Biology has emerged to provide an integrated overview of biological systems on the "post-genomic era" and predict how they operate to produce a determined phenotype (Ideker et al., 2001;Chuang et al., 2010).Omics technologies coupled to computational biology have been applied to study different aspects of parasites (Bourgard et al., 2018; Maruyama et al., 2019b;Garcia et al., 2020), host responses (Saric et al., 2010;Gardinassi et al., 2016;Gardinassi et al., 2018;Hargrave et al., 2019; Maruyama et al., 2019a), interaction with vectors (Srivastava et al., 2016;Inbar et al., 2017) and the host microbiome (Jenkins et al., 2018;Corteś et al., 2020;Jenkins et al., 2021).Considering these concepts and philosophy, this Research Topic was formulated to communicate high-quality work in this area of investigation and associated disciplines, which gathered original research, review, perspective and hypothesis and theory articles.The first published article of this Research Topic tackled a technical issue related to the zoonotic protozoan parasite, Giardia lamblia.Heller et al. applied shotgun mass spectrometry to uncover that transfection of the reference strain WBC6 with glucuronidase A (GusA) from Escherichia coli affects the cellular proteomic profile and induces antigenic variation.Results from this study have strong implications for the interpretation of experiments involving transfected Giardia and related controls, because comparisons with un-transfected trophozoites may lead to spurious results.Other protozoan parasites including Leishmania and Plasmodium were also addressed.Horaćio et al. provided a perspective of how systems biology approaches have been used and can contribute to future discoveries in drug resistance of Leishmania parasites.Current therapeutics and how networks of biochemical pathways can be involved in drug resistance were explored, with the authors indicating antioxidant defense enzymes as biomarkers of resistance and drug targets.The development of new therapeutic venues or vaccines to prevent disease can be explored with systems biological approaches, including immunopeptidomics.In this Research Topic, Juanes- Velasco et al. reviewed advances and strategies used to identify immunogenic peptides presented on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules and recognized by T cells.The review is broad and provides an informative overview of immunopeptidomics in infectious diseases and cancer.

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