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...在现代分类学研究中，DNA条形码（DNA barcoding）在因样本质量不佳导致生物特征参数难以测定或无参考价值的场景下尤为适用，此类情形在寄生虫学领域颇为常见。本研究针对生物多样性仍被严重低估的带绦虫属（Taenia）绦虫，结合DNA条形码与形态学分析开展整合研究。具体而言，我们对采自意大利野猫（Felis silvestris silvestris）、散养家猫（F. s. catus）及其杂交种群的绦虫进行了系统表征。通过对宿主实施尸检采集成年带科绦虫，并经形态学鉴定为带状带绦虫（Taenia taeniaeformis）。我们为所有受试标本扩增得到cox1条形码序列，并与从GenBank获取的带属绦虫参考序列进行了比对分析。为评估DNA条形码方法对这类寄生虫的区分效能，我们对相关性强度……