Hemolivia and Hepatozoon: Haemogregarines with Tangled Evolutionary Relationships

FirstHemoliviafrom southern Africa: reassigning chelonianHaemogregarina parvulaDias, 1953 (Adeleorina: Haemogregarinidae) toHemolivia(Adeleorina: Karyolysidae)

“…The phylogenetic analyses performed here concur with the findings of Barta et al (2012), Haklová-Kočíková et al (2014), Kvičerová et al (2014) and Netherlands et al (2014aNetherlands et al ( , 2014b, but conflict with those of Harris et al (2013) in that Hemolivia is seen as a sister taxon to Hepatozoon. A similar problem is evident for classification of species of Karyolysus Labbé, 1894, which also fall within the Hepatozoon clade (see Haklová-Kočíková et al 2014).…”

“…Haemogregarina parvula) (Dias, 1953) 12.1 0. Kvičerová et al (2014) containing both Hemolivia and Hepatozoon species, and distinct from the clade containing Haemogregarina species. The genetic dissimilarities between the species within these two clades were evident (Table 4).…”

Morphological and molecular characterization of Karyolysus ¿ a neglected but common parasite infecting some European lizards

“…isolates obtained in this study within Hepatozoon making this genus paraphyletic [19,21,35,36], we can observe differences in biology of these two genera of parasites. Hepatozoon is transmitted via ingestion of a wide spectrum of invertebrates (ixodid and argasid ticks, triatomid bugs, leeches, flies, sucking lice, fleas, sandflies and mosquitoes) [37] and is characterized by polysporocystic oocysts formed in hemocoel of the abdomen, thorax or within the head of final host [1,37].…”

“…Since new lineages are regularly being identified, for example in birds [32], or caecilians [20] it also seems premature to rearrange the nomenclature, since new discoveries will almost certainly alter our understanding of evolutionary relationships of these parasites [33]. A similar situation arises regarding the genus Hemolivia, which also appears to be part of the same major group with Hepatozoon and Karyolysus, and for which relationships vary depending on the out-groups employed [21,34]. Although the sequences used in this study are quite short (584 bp), this issue is unlikely to be resolved with a longer fragment of 18S rRNA, since [18] already demonstrated that estimates of relationships based on this short fragment were the same as those based on the longer fragment employed in some other studies.…”

“…Karyolysus parasites are neglected in molecular and phylogenetic analyses. More molecular data are available for Hemolivia, however the phylogenetic position of the genus remains unclear [19][20][21].…”