Russian scientists infirst showswhetherthat the exclusive parasites of labiopods are among the most ancient terrestrial sporozoans – a group of unicellular parasites, among which the most famous are the causative agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis. Scientific article published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Employee work Institute of Ecology and Evolution. A. N. Severtsov RAS in collaboration with scientists from Moscow State University. MV Lomonosov and the Russian-Vietnamese Tropical Center, is dedicated to unique single-celled parasites – gregarines from the families Dactylophoridae And Trichorhynchidaewhich are found exclusively in labiopods (scolopendras, flycatchers and others).

The study was the first to establish the exact position of these parasites on the evolutionary tree. The results showed that these gregarines are the closestit relatives of one of the most ancient lineages of all gregarines that infect terrestrial invertebrates.

It has also been shown that the gregarines of carnivorous and herbivorous (lipopods and bipopods) millipedes are not closely related. This means that they “colonized” their hosts independently and evolved in parallel for millions of years. The authors proposed to separate all specialized gregarines of labiopods into a new superfamily – Dactylophoroidea.

“This discovery helps us understand how the land was conquered not only by animals, but also by their parasites. The emergence of centipedes on land was a key event for these single-celled organisms. In addition, the work describes a new species of gregarine for science – Trichorhynchus efeykinifound in a flycatcher in Vietnam. This is only the second species discovered in this family over the past 140 years,” said Alexandra Kudryavkina, junior researcher at the Laboratory of Systematics and Evolution of Parasites of the Institute of Ecological Economy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

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