Spirometra

Xiao, Xiao, Qi, Rui, Han, Hui-Ju, Liu, Jian-Wei, Qin, Xiang-Rong, Fang, Li-Zhu, Zhou, Chuan-Min, Gong, Xiao-Qing, Lei, Si-Cong & Yu, Xue-Jie, 2019, Molecular identification and phylogenetic analysis of Cryptosporidium, Hepatozoon and Spirometra in snakes from central China, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 10, pp. 274-280 : 276

3.3. Infection of Spirometra

55 snakes of 8 species were found infected with spargana, with the highest infection rate being recorded in P. dhumnades (92%, 23/25), followed by G. brevicaudus (83.3%, 10/12). A total of 339 sparganas were collected. The spargana burden per snake ranged from 1 to 26. A total of 40 representative spargana samples were randomly chosen from 8 infected snake species group for DNA extraction. Sequence analysis of mitochondrial cox1 gene indicated all 40 obtained sequences share 100% similarity with S. erinaceieuropaei (MG762084) recovered from snakes in Hunan Province, China. Phylogeny analysis also showed the spargana recovered in the present study clustered with S. erinaceieuropaei ( Fig. 3 ).

Figures

Fig. 3. Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree of Spirometra based on the cox1 gene. The tree was constructed with the cox1 sequences (444bp) by using the Kimura 2-parameter model with MEGA 7.0; we calculated bootstrap values with 1000 replicates. The representative sequence of Spirometra spagarnas isolated from snakes in this study are in bold print and marked by circles. Scale bar indicates nucleotide substitutions per site.