The monogenean ectoparasite genera Dactylogyrus and Gyrodactylus are hyperdiverse, and yet monogenean communities infecting freshwater fish in the northern Holarctic are variable and often impoverished. This is a result of extinctions during periods of glaciation when the host fishes experienced range contraction. Fish species recolonised northern Europe by one of three routes; stenohaline fish...

conclusions the results of the present study revealed that soil resources of these areas were contaminated with opportunistic amoebas such as acanthamoeba and hartmannella spp. and this may lead to severe diseases in high-risk people, such as immunocompromised patients. background free-living amoebas are very abundant in nature, especially in water and soil. some species of amoebas cause seriou...

We present an in silico approach for the reconstruction of complete mitochondrial genomes of non-model organisms directly from next-generation sequencing (NGS) data-mitochondrial baiting and iterative mapping (MITObim). The method is straightforward even if only (i) distantly related mitochondrial genomes or (ii) mitochondrial barcode sequences are available as starting-reference sequences or s...

Gyrodactylus thymalli Zitnan, 1960 and G. salaris Malmberg, 1957 have an indistinguishable ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) DNA sequence, but exhibit surprisingly high levels of intra- and interspecific sequence variation of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (CO1) gene. To test whether different populations of these reportedly very similar species could be discriminated using mo...

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is crucial to the adaptive immune response of vertebrates and is among the most polymorphic gene families known. Its high diversity is usually attributed to selection imposed by fast-evolving pathogens. Pathogens are thought to evolve to escape recognition by common immune alleles, and, hence, novel MHC alleles, introduced through mutation, recombinati...

Gyrodactylus colisai n. sp., found on body surface of fish, Colisa fasciata collected at Hastinapur, Meerut, India, is described. New species is characterized morphologically in having a club shaped head organ and absence of ventral bar membrane. 28S ribosomal DNA of this worm has also been sequenced for molecular characterization and found to be distinct from all the species of this genus, seq...