Polyphaga plancyi Bolívar, 1883, also known as Chinese sand roach, it is a large Corydiidae species with native distribution that includes several provinces and southern part of the Russian Far East. It well-known insect in traditional medicine, biological activity compounds isolated from are actively studied. So far, there no records this outside its natural range, at least China. I...

The free-living amoeba (FLA) Acanthamoeba sp. is an opportunistic pathogen that can cause amoebic keratitis (AK) or granulomatous amoebic encephalitis (GAE). While current treatments of AK are long with some relapses, no consensus therapy has been developed for GAE remaining lethal in 90% of the cases. In this context, efficient antiacanthamoebal drugs have to be identified. In this work, 15 dr...

Water beetles belonging to the suborder Polyphaga vary greatly in larval and adult ecologies, and fulfil important functional roles in shallow-water ecosystems by processing plant material, scavenging and through predation. This study investigates the species richness and composition of aquatic polyphagan assemblages in and around the St Lucia estuarine lake (South Africa), within the iSimangal...

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Cockroaches were collected from hospitals, houses and poultry sheds in various parts of Isfahan (Iran) and identified to species. In total, seven species of cockroaches in seven genera were identified: Blatta lateralis, Polyphaga aegyptiaca, Arenivaga roseni and Parcoblatta spp. Three species Periplaneta americana, Blattella germanica and Supella longipalpa (Blattidae and Blattellidae) were mor...

A distinct class of infectious agents, the virophages that infect giant viruses of the Mimiviridae family, has been recently described. Here we report the simultaneous discovery of a giant virus of Acanthamoeba polyphaga (Lentille virus) that contains an integrated genome of a virophage (Sputnik 2), and a member of a previously unknown class of mobile genetic elements, the transpovirons. The tr...

Current hypotheses regarding family relationships in the suborder Adephaga (Coleoptera) are conflicting. Here we report full-length 18S ribosomal RNA sequences of 39 adephagans and 13 outgroup taxa. Data analysis focused on the impact of sequence alignment on tree topology, using two principally different approaches. Tree alignments, which seek to minimize indels and substitutions on the tree i...