Data from: Phylogeny of haemosporidian blood parasites revealed by a multi-gene approach

The apicomplexan order Haemosporida is a clade of unicellular blood
parasites that infect a variety of reptilian, avian and mammalian hosts.
Among them are the agents of human malaria, parasites of the genus
Plasmodium, which pose a major threat to human health. Illuminating the
evolutionary history of Haemosporida may help us in understanding their
enormous biological diversity, as well as tracing the multiple host
switches and associated acquisitions of novel life-history traits.
However, the deep-level phylogenetic relationships among major
haemosporidian clades have remained enigmatic because the datasets
employed in phylogenetic analyses were severely limited in either gene
coverage or taxon sampling. Using a PCR-based approach that employs a
novel set of primers, we sequenced fragments of 21 nuclear genes from
seven haemosporidian parasites of the genera Leucocytozoon, Haemoproteus,
Parahaemoproteus, Polychromophilus and Plasmodium. After addition of
genomic data from 25 apicomplexan species, the unreduced alignment
comprised 20,580 bp from 32 species. Phylogenetic analyses were performed
based on nucleotide, codon and amino acid data employing Bayesian
inference, maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony. All analyses resulted
in highly congruent topologies. We found consistent support for a basal
position of Leucocytozoon within Haemosporida. In contrast to all previous
studies, we recovered a sister group relationship between the genera
Polychromophilus and Plasmodium. Within Plasmodium, the sauropsid and
mammal-infecting lineages were recovered as sister clades. Support for
these relationships was high in nearly all trees, revealing a novel
phylogeny of Haemosporida, which is robust to the choice of the outgroup
and the method of tree inference.