Folia Parasitologica 69:024 (2022) | DOI: 10.14411/fp.2022.024

Does the fish-infecting Trypanosoma micropteri belong to Trypanosoma carassii?

Peng Zhang ORCID...¹, Ke Chen ORCID...¹, Michaela Svobodová², Ting-Bao Yang¹, Julius Lukeš ORCID...^{2, 3}, Jinyong Zhang⁴, Zhao-Rong Lun ORCID...¹, De-Hua Lai ORCID...¹

¹ Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Aquatic Economic Animals, State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, PR China;

² Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, České Budĕjovice, Czech Republic;

³ Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, České Budĕjovice, Czech Republic;

⁴ School of Marine Science and Engineering, Qingdao Agricultural University, Qingdao, PR China

Recently, based on a limited morphological characterisation and partial 18S rRNA gene sequence, Jiang et al. (2019) described Trypanosoma micropteri Jiang, Lu, Du, Wang, Hu, Su et Li, 2019 as a new pathogen of farmed fish. Here we provide evidence based on the expanded sequence dataset, morphology and experimental infections that this trypanosome does not warrant the establishment as a new species, because it is conspecific with the long-term known Trypanosoma carassii Mitrophanow, 1883, a common haemoflagellate parasite of freshwater fish. The former taxon thus becomes a new junior synonym of T. carassii.

Keywords: Trypanosomes, 18S rRNA gene, morphological data, host ranges, fish, classification, synonymy

Received: January 26, 2022; Revised: June 21, 2022; Accepted: July 8, 2022; Published online: October 31, 2022  Show citation