First report of Mesocriconema sphaerocephalum (Taylor, 1936) Loof, 1989 associated with wild grass in Botswana

Ebrahim Shokoohi

doi:10.21307/jofnem-2021-013

Abstract

Abstract During a survey on the biodiversity of plant-parasitic nematodes of natural areas in Botswana, Mesocriconema sphaerocephalum was discovered around the rhizosphere of the wild grass. The nematodes were extracted using the tray method and then fixed according to the available protocols. The morphological characters fit well with the M. sphaerocephalum. Besides, molecular aspects using 18S and 28S rDNA were studied. The phylogenetic analysis of 18S and 28S rDNA placed the examined population with other populations of M. sphaerocephalum in a group. According to the knowledge, this is the first report of M. spaherocephalum from Botswana.

Highlights

During a survey on the biodiversity of plant-parasitic nematodes of natural areas in Botswana, Mesocriconema sphaerocephalum was discovered around the rhizosphere of the wild grass
Pictures were taken with a Nikon Eclipse 80i light microscope provided with differential interference contrast optics (DIC) and a Nikon Digital Sight DS-U1 camera (Nikon, Tokyo, Japan)
Analysis using the HKY + Γ model was initiated with a random starting tree and ran with the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for 106 generations for 18S and 28S rDNA

Summary

Introduction

During a survey on the biodiversity of plant-parasitic nematodes of natural areas in Botswana, Mesocriconema sphaerocephalum was discovered around the rhizosphere of the wild grass. Mesocriconema xenoplax (Loof and De Grisse, 1989; Raski, 1952) is the type species distributed worldwide (Geraert, 2010). During a survey on nematodes of the natural areas of Botswana, M. sphaerocephalum (Loof, 1989; Taylor, 1936) was recovered from the wild grass in Botswana.

Results

Conclusion