Morphological Re-Description and 18 S rDNA Sequence Confirmation of the Pinworm Aspiculuris tetraptera (Nematoda, Heteroxynematidae) Infecting the Laboratory Mice Mus musculus

Abstract

Aspiculuris tetraptera is a heteroxynematid nematoda infecting most of the laboratory animals, occasionally mice which represent the mostly used animal for biological, medical, and pharmacological studies. The present study aimed to investigate the prevalence of nematode parasites infection in the laboratory mice Mus musculus in Egypt. Morphologically, this oxyurid possessed four distinct cephalic papillae on a cephalic plate, with three small rudimental lips carrying two sessile poorly developed labial papillae and one pair of amphidial pores. Esophagus divided into cylindrical corpus and globular bulb. Distinct cervical alae interrupted at the level of esophago-intestinal junction forming an acute angle. At the caudal end, twelve caudal papillae in male worms while an ovijector apparatus opening and a vulva surrounded by protruded lips in females were observed. The general morphological criteria include this nematode with other Aspiculuris species which were compared in the present study. Molecular characterization based on 18SSU rDNA sequencing performed to confirm the taxonomic position of this species and to documents the morphological data. Sequence alignment detects a percent of identity up to 88.0% with other Heteroxynematidae species. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the present recorded is a putative sister taxon to A. tetraptera recorded in a previous study. The SSU rDNA sequence has been deposited in the GenBank under the accession no. MG019400.

Morphological and molecular characterization of Aspiculuris tetraptera (nematoda: Heteroxynematidae) from Mus musculus (rodentia: Muridae) in Saudi Arabia

“…It has been reported that infections with the rodents’ oxyurid nematodes; A. tetraptera and S. obvelata generally influenced by the age of the host and infection with the first worm affect older animals while the latter affects younger animals and occurs in young mice [ 42 , 43 ]. Reporting of high prevalence in our study and Abdel-Gaber et al [ 37 ] study may be explained by the fact that adult mice were investigated in both studies as has been reported before [ 42 , 43 ].…”

“…Morphological as well as morphometric characteristics showed that the species recovered from mice autopsied at the Department of Zoology, College of Science, King Saud University, resembles A. tetraptera as has been described previously by [6,36]. There were slight morphometric differences between other A. tetraptera described from other studies [37].…”

“…Morphometric variation in the worms A. tetraptera has been noticed from studies from the same region. On separate studies some investigators recorded variation in lengths of male and female A. tetraptera [ 37–39 ]. The lengths of the worms reported in the present study, however, overlapped with these studies.…”

“…Bazzano et al [ 40 ] detected a prevalence of 8.5% and Kataranovski et al [ 41 ] detected a prevalence of 12.8%. On a recent study from Egypt, Abdel-Gaber et al [ 37 ] detected as high as 56% of A. tetraptera prevalence of A. tetraptera infection in the mice investigated.…”

Helminth Parasites among Rodents in the Middle East Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…However, articles that were ambiguous regarding their relevance by their title and abstract were subjected to full-text analysis. Only documents published in English were considered for the review [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ,…”