RESEARCH ARTICLE Comparative Phylogenetic Studies on Schistosoma japonicum and Its Snail Intermediate Host Oncomelania hupensis: Origins, Dispersal and Coevolution Stephen W. Attwood1,2*, Motomu Ibaraki3, Yasuhide Saitoh4, Naoko Nihei5,6, Daniel A. Janies7 1 State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital, West China Medical School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom, 3 School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America, 4 Department of Environmental Parasitology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan, 5 Laboratory of Parasitology, School of Veterinary Medicine, Azabu University, Sagamihara, Japan, 6 Department of Medical Entomology, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, Japan, 7 Bioinformatics and Genomics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America *
[email protected] OPEN ACCESS Abstract Citation: Attwood SW, Ibaraki M, Saitoh Y, Nihei N, Janies DA (2015) Comparative Phylogenetic Studies on Schistosoma japonicum and Its Snail Intermediate Background Host Oncomelania hupensis: Origins, Dispersal and Coevolution. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 9(7): e0003935. Schistosoma japonicum causes major public health problems in China and the Philippines; doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0003935 this parasite, which is transmitted by freshwater snails of the species Oncomelania hupen- Editor: Joanne P. Webster, Imperial College London, sis, causes the disease intestinal schistosomiasis in humans and cattle. Researchers work- UNITED KINGDOM ing on Schistosoma in Africa have described the relationship between the parasites and Received: April 30, 2015 their snail intermediate hosts as coevolved or even as an evolutionary arms race. In the present study this hypothesis of coevolution is evaluated for S.