Morphometric and molecular characterisation of Hepatozoon bashtari n. sp. in painted saw-scaled viper, Echis coloratus (
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PROTOZOOLOGY - ORIGINAL PAPER
Morphometric and molecular characterisation of Hepatozoon bashtari n. sp. in painted saw-scaled viper, Echis coloratus (Ophidia, Viperidae) Abdel-Azeem S. Abdel-Baki 1
& Lamjed Mansour
2,3
4
2
& Esam S. Al-Malki & Saleh Al-Quraishy & Heba M. Abdel-Haleem
1
Received: 17 December 2019 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 / Published online: 26 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Hepatozoon species are the most widely known haemogregarines infecting a wide range of vertebrates, although predominately snakes. Herein, Hepatozoon bashtari n. sp., originally infecting the painted saw-scaled viper, Echis coloratus, in Saudi Arabia is described using both morphological features and molecular data from 18S rDNA sequences. The overall prevalence of infection was 60% (9/15) with parasitaemia ranging from 52 to 60%. Gamonts were entirely intraerythrocytic and were observed to cause considerable hypertrophy within the host cell. The mean size of mature gamonts was 15.4 × 3.3 μm. Merogonic stages were confined to the lung endothelial cells with monomorphic meronts. The average size of mature meronts was 32 × 12 μm and they were estimated to produce 13–16 merozoites each. The phylogenetic tree generated from SSU rDNA sequences revealed that Hepatozoon bashtari sp. n. clusters with the vast majority of other Hepatozoon species infecting snakes, lizards and geckos in various regions of the world, which would appear to support the hypothesis of prey-predator transmission of the genus Hepatozoon. Through a combination of morphological comparison with closely related Hepatozoon spp. and 18S rRNA gene sequence analysis, it is possible to confirm Hepatozoon bashtari sp. n. as a new species. Keywords Haemoparasite . Snake . Merogony . SSU rDNA
Introduction Genus Hepatozoon encompasses cosmopolitan intraerythrocytic apicomplexan parasites that have been described from all classes Section Editor: Leonhard Schnittger Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-06886-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Abdel-Azeem S. Abdel-Baki [email protected] 1
Zoology Department, Faculty of Science, Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt
2
Zoology Department, College of Science, King Saud University, P.O. Box 2455, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia
3
Laboratory of Biodiversity and Parasitology of Aquatic Ecosystems (LR18ES05), Department of Biology, Faculty of Science of Tunis, University Campus, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis 2092, Tunisia
4
Department of Biology, College of Sciences, Majmaah University, Al-Majmaah 11952, Riyadh Region, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
of vertebrates (Smith and Desser 1997). Infection of reptilian hosts with species from the genus Hepatozoon was first detected by Hoare (1932) when he described the sporogony of H. pettiti in tsetse flies who had fed on infected Nile crocodiles. Since this date, the range of reptilian hosts for members of this gen
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