siamensis sequences, similar results were observed. This tree showed high congruence to hsp70 tree since all taxa were concordantly clustered into the same species complex and placed L. selleck chemicals siamensis at the basal branch of Leishmania in Euleishmania section. Figure 1 The unrooted phylogenetic tree inferred from DNA sequences of four markers using Neighbor Joining method. The bootstrapping values less than 50 are omitted. The bootstrapping and posterior probability values estimated by Maximum parsimony and Bayesian inference methods are shown in parenthesis at each node, respectively. Asterisks indicate

bootstrapping and posterior probability values that are below 50 or 0.5 or are not calculated by the analyses. Dense lines indicate Leishmania species complexes as described by Lainson and Shaw [30]. The species complex of L. adleri, L. turanica, L. gerbilli, JAK inhibitor and L. arabica are unclassified. Dot lines indicate the lineage sections suggested by Cupolillo et al. [35]. (a) SSU-rRNA, (b) ITS1, (c) hsp70, (d) cyt b. In addition, the L. siamensis lineage TR was closely related to L. enrietti whereas lineage PG was furcated into a sister clade (Figure 1d). For sequence alignments of the ITS1, hsp70, and cyt b regions, see

Additional files 1, 2, 3. Discussion This study characterized L. siamensis isolated from autochthonous VL Thai patients based on sequencing of four genetic loci.

The construction of molecular evolutionary trees of Leishmania species has been extensively studied on various genetic markers both in conserved and variable regions [10–17]. The results of these studies allow us to view evolutionary processes, classify and discriminate species among Leishmania isolates. One of the widely used genetic markers for phylogenetic studies is the ribosomal RNA gene. This gene has proved to be useful for inferring the relationships of a wide range of organisms, including Leishmania[7, 27]. Even though the phylogenetic study based on the complete SSU-rRNA has shown that the variation of this gene limits the classification of this parasite at the subgenus level, studying the phylogenetic position using this gene is fundamentally required for a novel species, Reverse transcriptase like L. siamensis[28, 29]. In this study, L. siamensis was grouped in the monophyletic branch of subgenus Leishmania (Leishmania) at a long distance in a unique subclade, primarily suggesting that this novel species is closely related to the members of L. (Leishmania) but evolved rapidly and nonrelative to the members in this subgenus. The incapability to discriminate between two lineages of L. siamensis proposed from the genetic distance analysis was not selleck chemicals llc beyond our expectation since the studied region of this gene was remarkably conserved.