Nycteria Parasites of Afrotropical Insectivorous Bats
Publication Date
2015
Description
Parasitic protozoan parasites have evolved many co-evolutionary paths towards stable transmission to their host population. Plasmodium spp., the causative agents of malaria, and related haemosporidian parasites are dipteran-borne eukaryotic pathogens that actively invade and use vertebrate erythrocytes for gametogenesis and asexual development, often resulting in substantial morbidity and mortality of the infected hosts. Here, we present results of a survey of insectivorous bats from tropical Africa, including new isolates of species of the haemosporidian genus Nycteria. A hallmark of these parasites is their capacity to infect bat species of distinct families of the two evolutionary distant chiropteran suborders. We did detect Nycteria parasites in both rhinolophid and nycterid bat hosts in geographically separate areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, however our molecular phylogenetic analyses support the separation of the parasites into two distinct clades corresponding to their host genera, suggestive of ancient co-divergence and low levels of host switching. For one clade of these parasites, cytochrome b genes could not be amplified and cytochrome oxidase I sequences showed unusually high rates of evolution, suggesting that the mitochondrial genome of these parasites may have either been lost or substantially altered. This haemosporidian parasite-mammalian host system also highlights that sequential population expansion in the liver and gametocyte formation is a successful alternative to intermediate erythrocytic replication cycles. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of Australian Society for Parasitology Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Journal
International Journal for Parasitology
Volume
45
Issue
6
First Page
375
Last Page
384
Department
Biology
Link to Published Version
DOI
10.1016/j.ijpara.2015.01.008
Recommended Citation
Schaer, Juliane; Reeder, DeeAnn; Vodzak, Megan E.; Olival, Kevin J.; Weber, Natalie; Mayer, Frieder; Matuschewski, Kai; and Perkins, Susan L.. "Nycteria Parasites of Afrotropical Insectivorous Bats." International Journal for Parasitology (2015) : 375-384.