This is a joint effort by Martin Egerhill, a master student at the Bioinformatics program at Lund University, and Björn Canbäck and Staffan Bensch at the Department of Biology, Lund University. All tables have been transferred from Access to SQL and it is now a fully relational database using the same taxonomy tables as in NCBI. At the front page there are 8 executable "Reports" that retrieve data from MalAvi. These reports can be downloaded as excel or text files. The webpage now also offers a BLAST function to find matches among the >1500 unique haemosporidian lineages presently available in the database and fasta files for download. If you find errors in the database, please report these to staffan.bensch@biol.lu.se. Please also report studies that are missing. To help with preparing your data for upload in MalAvi there is an excel file with pre-filled examples of how the data should be entered available for download at the front page.

Avian malaria parasites Plasmodium and related haemosporidians (Haemoproteus and Leucocytozoon) multiply as haploid clones in avian hosts and undergo a sexual phase in dipteran vectors. Although these parasites are more species diverse in the tropics, many have active transmission in temperate regions as far north as the Arctic polar circle. Molecular analyses have revealed that the global species diversity of avian malaria parasites and related haemosporidians is much higher than previously appreciated, perhaps counting thousands of species. Host shifts have been remarkably frequent. In evolutionary time this has been demonstrated by phylogenetic analyses of hosts and parasites and in ecological time it is evidenced by the documentation of identical mitochondrial haplotypes in multiple host species. The majority of haemosporidian parasites appears to be host specialists or restricted to a limited number of closely related host species but this view may change as data will accumulate. To understand the evolution and ecological factors driving this complex multihost-multiparasite system requires good knowledge of the host range and geographical distribution of the parasite lineages. The Malavi database provides this service. Note however that a molecular finding of a cytochrome b lineage by PCR is no guarantee that the species is a competent host. This requires microscopic examination of thin blood films confirming presence of gametocytes, or ultimately by controlled infection experiments.