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between Mesocestoididae, Taeniidae,
Hymenolepididae and Anoplocephalidae.
Taeniids are the best-known cestodes. The
various phylogenetic methods applied to Taenia and
Echinococcus corroborates the monophyletic
grouping of the family Taeniidae. The present
analysis agrees to the monophyly of other families
under Cyclophyllidea; further analysis can be done
once more and more molecular markers are
deposited in public gene bank databases.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Molecular morphometrics approach that uses
combined features both from anatomical and
quantitative morphometrics and molecular primary
sequence comparison was the basis of our study. The
approach differentiates significant features between
anatomical and molecular characters that make
molecular morphometrics a strong predictive tool for
phylogenetic resolution. There is always more than
one gene involved in anatomical variations and most
importantly the genetic sites responsible for
morphological characters are usually not known. On
the contrary, molecular structural variations are
because of identifiable mutations that can be
characterized at the single mutational level. The
observed anatomical characters are the outcome of
both the genetic characters as well as epigenetic
effects (environmental influences) whereas the
molecular morphometrics method takes advantage of
the fact that molecular characters are independent of
their somatic expression (Smith, 1992).
The analysis corroborated strong results for
phylogenetic relationships of cyclophyllidean
cestodes and this was so because of using ITS2 data
as phylogenetic molecular markers and the inclusion
of secondary structure information that offers a
resolution power for relationships from the level of
sub species up to the order level.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was carried out under the DIT sponsored
project, “Northeast Parasite Information and
Analysis Centre” sanctioned to VT by the Ministry
of Communication & Information Technology
(Government of India) and Bioinformatics Centre
NEHU with partial support from UGC-supported
UPE-Bioscioences Programme in the School of Life
Sciences at NEHU.
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SYSTEMATIC POSITION AND PHYLOGENETIC RELATIONSHIPS OF THE CYCLOPHYLLIDEAN CESTODES -
An In-silico Study using ITS2 rDNA and Sequence-structure Alignment
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