Establishment of Liebermannia dichroplusae n. comb. on the basis of molecular characterization of Perezia dichroplusae Lange, 1987 (Microsporidia).

Perezia dichroplusae Lange, 1987 is a parasite of the Malpighian tubules of an Argentine grasshopper, Dichroplus elongatus (Orthoptera, Acrididae, Melanoplinae). In order to determine relationships of this microsporidium with Perezia nelsoni and with other microsporidia, we sequenced its small subunit ribosomal RNA gene (SSU rDNA) (GenBank Accession No. EF016249) and performed phylogenetic analysis of the novel sequence against 17 microsporidian SSU rDNA sequences from GenBank, using neighbor-joining (NJ), maximum-parsimony (MP), and maximum-likelihood (ML) methods. This analysis revealed the highest similarity (96%) of the new sequence to Liebermannia patagonica, a parasite of gut epithelium cells of another grasshopper from Argentina, versus only 65% similarity to P. nelsoni, a parasite of muscles of paenaeid shrimps. In phylogenetic trees inferred from SSU rDNA sequences, the microsporidium from D. elongatus is sister taxon to L. patagonica and both cluster with Orthosomella operophterae. At the higher hierarchical level, the Liebermania-Orthosomella branch forms a clade with the Endoreticulatus-Cystosporogenus-Vittaforma group and with Enterocytozoon bieneusi. Perezia nelsoni falls into another large clade together with Nosema and Ameson species. We propose transferring P. dichroplusae to the genus Liebermannia and creating a new combination Liebermannia dichroplusae n. comb., based both on SSU rDNA sequence analysis and on common characters between P. dichroplusae and L. patagonica, which include the presence of elongated multinuclear sporonts, sporoblastogenesis by a similar process of sequentially splitting off sporoblasts, ovocylindrical spores of variable size, tissue tropism limited to epithelial cells, Orthoptera as hosts, and geographical distribution of hosts in the southern temperate region of Argentina. We argue that the condition of the nuclei in spores (i.e. diplokaryotic in L. patagonica or monokaryotic in L. dichroplusae) cannot be used to distinguish genera. Therefore, we remove the statement about the presence of diplokaryotic spores from the revised diagnosis of the genus Liebermannia.