Abstract
Dugesia hepta Pala, Casu & Vacca, 1981 and Dugesia benazzii Lepori, 1951 are two freshwater planarian species from the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. Dugesia hepta is endemic of Sardinia and distributed in four northern hydrographic basins where it co-occurs with D. benazzii, which has a wider Tyrrhenian distribution. Although these species have been broadly studied—especially D. benazzii—as regards to their variety of reproductive patterns as well as for their karyological diversity, little is known about them from a molecular phylogenetic perspective. For the first time, we present a molecular phylogenetic tree of the two species and their populations based on two molecular markers—one mitochondrial, Cox1, and one nuclear, Dunuc12. Our results not only confirm that both species are molecularly distinct but also show that D. benazzii’s Corsican and Sardinian populations could belong to separate species. Furthermore, we present the first demonstration of a natural hybridization between different species in the genus Dugesia on the basis of molecular data.
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Acknowledgments
We kindly thank Prof. Maria Pala and Dr. Eva Lázaro for providing specimens of D. hepta and D. benazzii. We are also grateful to Dr. Marta Álvarez-Presas for her always-welcomed advice and guiding throughout the development of the analytical part of this study, and to all of our laboratory members for their help.
Data availability statement
The sequences generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the GenBank repository (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), under accession numbers MN162692, MN162693(ITS-1 haplotypes), MN442429 to MN442516 (Dunuc12), MN442517 to MN442535 (COI cloned haplotypes), MN525628 to MN525771 (COI), and MN565083 to MN565258 (Dunuc12 cloned haplotypes).
Funding
This research was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (project CGL2015-63527-P).
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Dols-Serrate, D., Leria, L., Aguilar, J.P. et al. Dugesia hepta and Dugesia benazzii (Platyhelminthes: Tricladida): two sympatric species with occasional sex?. Org Divers Evol 20, 369–386 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-020-00438-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-020-00438-z