Integrative taxonomy at work: DNA barcoding of taeniids harbored by wild and domestic cats

In modern taxonomy, DNA barcoding is particularly useful where biometric parameters are difficult to determine or useless due to the poor quality of samples. These situations are frequent in parasitology. Here we present an integrated study, based on both DNA barcoding and morphological analysis, on cestodes belonging to the genus Taenia, for which biodiversity is still largely underestimated. In particular, we characterized cestodes from Italian wildcats (Felis silvestris silvestris), free-ranging domestic cats (F. s. catus) and their hybrids populations. Adult taeniids were collected by post-mortem examinations of the hosts, and morphologically identified as Taenia taeniaeformis. We produced the cox1 barcode sequences for all the analyzed specimens and we compared them with reference sequences of individuals belonging to the genus Taenia retrieved from GenBank. In order to evaluate the performance of a DNA barcoding approach to discriminate these parasites, the strength of correlation...