Abstract:

This experiment was conducted to study the correlation of morphological and biological features to the phylogeny of rabbit coccidia. Five species of rabbit coccidia were isolated by singleoocyst separation technology and proliferated. Genomic DNA was extracted from their sporulated oocysts by the method of CATB. The ITS1 regions were cloned and sequenced，then they were aligned with corresponding sequence in the GenBank. The phylogenetic tree was obtained by NJ method. The complete ITS1 sequences of E. magna HB, E. flavescens HB, E. intestinalis HB, E. media HB, E. perforans HB were 320, 330, 351, 336 and 341 bp respectively in length. The sequence identities displayed 96.9%, 97.3%, 96.9%, 99.1% and 99.4%. Based on the ITS1sequence data, the rabbit coccidia monophyly was divided into 2 sister lineages, which was corresponding to the presence/absence of the oocyst residuum. Other morphological or biological traits (oocyst shape and size, pathogenicity, infection site, prepatent and patent periods, and number of asexual generations) do not explicitly correlate with the phylogeny of rabbit coccidia. The presence/absence of oocyst residuum is an evolutionarily conserved feature。