State-of-the-art Echinococcus and Taenia: phylogenetic taxonomy of human-pathogenic tapeworms and its application to molecular diagnosis

Abstract

The taxonomy of tapeworms belonging to the family Taeniidae has been controversial because of the paucity of adult phenotypic characters and the great plasticity of larvae in intermediate hosts. The family consists of the medically important two genera Echinococcus and Taenia, which are closely related to each other. Cladistic approaches using the molecular data of DNA and the numerical data of morphologic characters are clarifying phylogenetic relationships among the members of these genera. The nucleotide data of worldwide taeniid parasites accumulated in public DNA databases may provide a basis for the development of molecular diagnostic tools, and make it possible to identify the parasites, at least the human Taenia spp. by non-morphologists. Furthermore, the detection of intraspecific genetic variations prompts evolutionary and ecological studies to address fundamental questions of parasite distributional patterns. Here, we introduce the recent advances of taeniid phylogeny and its application to molecular diagnosis.