Oh my goodness! Unless you are a Tree of Life developer, you really shouldn't be here. This page is part of our beta test site, where we develop new features for the ToL, often messing up a thing or two in the process. Please visit the official version of this page, which is available here.
Under Construction

Wallaceina Podlipaev, Frolov & Kolesnikov 1990

Julius Lukes
Containing group: Trypanosomatida

Introduction

Within the last 100 years, the genera Leptomonas, Crithidia, Blastocrithidia, Wallaceina and Herpetomonas have been described based on the presence and/or combination of morphs in their life cycles. Some insect trypanosomatids contain a bacterial endosymbiont in their cytoplasm, which divides synchronously with the host cell (de Souza and Motta 1999). Aposymbiotic strains can be obtained by treatment of insect trypanosomatids with antibiotics. The presence of the endosymbiont is associated with morphological changes, such as a cryptic paraflagellar rod (Gadelha et al., 2005).  However, recent careful investigations of numerous new species isolated from insects showed that the taxonomy based on morphology is invalid for several reasons:

  1. there is much higher variability in morphology of a given species than anticipated
  2. for a given species, different stages can be found in the host and in the culture
  3. molecular phylogeny showed that none of these genera represents a monophyletic assembly of species.

Therefore, sequence data derived from conserved genes such as GAPDH, SL RNA and 18S rRNA should be used as main criteria for improved systematics of the insect trypanosomatids (Yurchenko et al., 2006; 2008).  Until this work has been done, it is not clear whether the species currently placed in the genus Wallaceina form a monophyletic group.

References

De Souza W. and M.C.M. Motta. 1999. Endosymbiosis in protozoa of the Trypanosomatidae family. FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 173: 1-8.

Gadelha C., B. Wickstead, W. de Souza, K. Gull and N. Cunha-e-Silva. 2005. Cryptic paraflagellar rod in endosymbiont-containing kinetoplastid protozoa. Eukaryot. Cell 4: 516-525.

Yurchenko V., J. Lukeš, X. Xu and D.A. Maslov. 2006. An integrated morphological and molecular approach to a new species description in the Trypanosomatidae: the case of Leptomonas podlipaevi n.sp., a parasite of Boisea rubrolineata (Hemiptera: Rhopalidae). J. Euk. Microbiol. 53: 103-111.

Yurchenko V.A., J. Lukeš, M. Tesařová, M. Jirků and D.A. Maslov. 2008. Morphological discordance of the new trypanosomatid species phylogenetically associated with the genus Crithidia. Protist 159: 99-114.

About This Page

This page is being developed as part of the Tree of Life Web Project Protist Diversity Workshop, co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program in Integrated Microbial Biodiversity and the Tula Foundation.


University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

Correspondence regarding this page should be directed to Julius Lukes at

All Rights Reserved.

Citing this page:

Lukes, Julius. 2009. Wallaceina Podlipaev, Frolov & Kolesnikov 1990. Version 02 January 2009 (under construction). http://tolweb.org/Wallaceina/98050/2009.01.02 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/

edit this page
close box

This page is a Tree of Life Branch Page.

Each ToL branch page provides a synopsis of the characteristics of a group of organisms representing a branch of the Tree of Life. The major distinction between a branch and a leaf of the Tree of Life is that each branch can be further subdivided into descendent branches, that is, subgroups representing distinct genetic lineages.

For a more detailed explanation of the different ToL page types, have a look at the Structure of the Tree of Life page.

close box

Wallaceina

Page Content

articles & notes

collections

people

Explore Other Groups

random page

  go to the Tree of Life home page
top