Although parasites are well‐known for adaptively evolving in order to exploit their hosts, they may experience strong genetic drift during transmission bottlenecks when infecting a new host. Host population structure and host population bottlenecks can also lead to genetic drift effects in parasite populations, constraining their adaptive evolution further. Here, we investigate the role of host population structure on the evol...

Genomics is a powerful toolkit for unravelling how evolutionary processes drive organisms’ small- and large-scale genetic variation. Several outstanding questions remain concerning the evolution of genome size and architecture, especially in intracellular parasites. Microsporidia became a model for this field of study as they exhibit genome size variation of more than an order of magnitude. Here, we discuss evolution in the la...

Analysing variation in a species’ genomic diversity can provide insights into its historical demography, biogeography and population structure, and thus its ecology and evolution. Although such studies are rarely undertaken for parasites, they can be highly revealing because of the parasite's co‐evolutionary relationships with hosts. Modes of reproduction and transmission are thought to be strong determinants of genomic divers...