Morphological and Molecular Characterization of Diplozoon kashmirensis;D. aegyptensis and D. guptai Collected from Fishes of Kashmir Valley-India

The study reports the results of molecular characterization of the Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) of ribosomal DNA of 3 Monogenean species using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), nucleotide sequencing and construction of phylogenetic trees from different fish hosts of Kashmir. The present study shows that the size of the amplified product is 873bp long for D. kashmirensis, 1120bp long in D. aegyptensis and 687bp long in D. guptai revealing that there are intraspecific differences in their base pair lengths. Guanine and Cytocine (G+C) content of three Diplozoon species was found nearly constant for three species i.e., 47% (D. kashmirensis); 47% (D. aegyptensis) and 48% (D. guptai), this GC richness contributes to physical attributes of RNA structures, as there is correlation between GC content and optimal growth temperature. An important observation during the present study has been noticed that Schizothorax niger is infected by all the three species of Diplozoidae; D. kashmirensis; D. aegyptensis and D. guptai, but when all six fishes were collected simultaneously, parasitism by all the parasite species was never observed. Phylogenetic trees Maximum Parsimony (MP), Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Neighbor Joining (NJ) showed that D. kashmirensis and D. aegyptensis share a common host Carassius carassius and S. niger.