Hepatospora eriocheir strain:canceri Genome sequencing and assembly. Hepatospora eriocheir strain:canceri

In our study we constructed a six-gene concatenated phylogenetic tree for Hepatospora spp., parasites of the invasive Chinese mitten crab (Stentiford et al., 2011), a pea crab (Pinnotheres pisum) infecting microsporidium (Longshaw et al., 2012) and a novel microsporidium that infects commercially important edible crabs (Cancer pagurus), all from European waters. Our results revealed that Hepatospora isolates from the three different crustacean hosts are likely to be microvariants of a single species. Further, they support the concept that microsporidian taxonomies based upon morphology are not only unreliable, but can be deceptive, even at the level of the species. Our data, together with description of H. eriocheir as an agent of emergent disease in Asian crab aquaculture (Ding et al., 2015) reveals a preponderance for microvariants of Hepatospora eriocheir to infect the gut of a wide array of decapods crustacean hosts across wide geographic boundaries and in a range of habitats.