M E Siddall

..Beyond the obvious need for reconsideration of decades of biomedical research on this widely used model organism, these findings impact regulatory statutes and raise concerns for the conservation status of European medicinal leeches...

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..Notorious throughout the world, the quintessential leech family Hirudinidae has been taken for granted to be monophyletic, as has the non-bloodfeeding family Haemopidae...

..The combined information content of a well corroborated leech phylogeny and broad taxonomic coverage of expressed proteins leads to a rich understanding of evolution and function in leech history...

..In this work we identified a new habitat for A. jandaei, and here we suggest that there is unexpected specificity between leeches and Aeromonas species...

..There is strong evidence of nocturnality and of the potential for parasitizing humans...

..These findings also underscore the as-yet unknown life cycles of commercially important parasites. Attempts to visualize spores of the parasite directly with scanning electron microscopy did not succeed...

..Evidence of successful feeding included blood upwelling from the point of attachment and gastric ceca of the leeches freshly filled with blood after removal. There was an apparent preference for the sulci between scales of the shell...

..Results support synonymy of the classes Clitellata and the more commonly used Oligochaeta. Leeches branchiobdellidans, and acanthobdellidans should be regarded as orders equal to their closest relatives, the order Lumbriculida...

..closely related to the nitrogen-fixing, nodule-forming Rhizobiaceae. The three bacterial strains, though different from each other were each other's closest relatives, suggesting a history of close coevolution with their leech hosts...

..detected in Hemiclepsis marginata. Combined, these results indicate that blood-feeding leeches have forged bacterial partnerships at least five times during their evolutionary history...

..The evolution of dietary and habitat preferences is examined...

..The characters used to define haemadipsoid families are reevaluated. Feeding preferences and biogeographic patterns are also examined...

..A neighbor-joining tree, as well as identification of diagnostic nucleotides, was used to suggest the presence of seven species of Helobdella in Mexico including potentially two undescribed forms...

..On the basis of data from the first case study, we designate a barcoded neotype of the European medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, on morphological and geographical grounds...

..Weekly examination of thin blood films revealed infections of the turtles at 130 days postfeeding. These observations provide support for broad host specificity of hemogregarine parasites of chelonians...

..The goal of identifying evolutionarily significant residues associated with biomedically significant phenomena implies continued insights from a broader sampling of blood-feeding leech salivary transcriptomes...

..Such long-term persistence of genetic structure may be due to the competitive effects between lineages or ecosystem stability in more southern latitudes...

..Two recently discovered parasites, one from abalone in New Zealand and another from spot prawns in British Columbia, fell at the base of the Haplosporidia with very strong support, indicating a taxonomic affinity to this group...

..Surprisingly, two Aeromonas species, A. veronii and A. jandaei, were cultured. Uncultured Rikenella-like bacteria were most similar to isolates from Hirudo verbana...