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Molecular Evolution and Phylogeny of Leishmania

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Drug Resistance in Leishmania Parasites

Abstract

The genus Leishmania was first described in 1903 for the parasite Leishmania donovani, but many additional species have been described since then. Although recent hierarchical taxonomic schemes have increasingly used molecular or biochemical characters to assign Leishmania organisms into different species, they are still heirs of the first classifications based primarily on geographical distribution, vector species, and disease presentations. The current classification system, based on multilocus enzyme electrophoresis, proposes up to 53 species, although molecular phylogenies of Leishmania suggest that the number of species may be too large. Very recently this classification system has been revised based on multiple gene phylogenies. For many decades, there has been a controversial discussion on whether the genus Leishmania appeared first in the Old World or in the New World. Analyses of whole-genome data led to the supercontinent hypothesis, in which the parasites evolved from a monoxenous ancestor on Gondwana and separated into Paraleishmania and all other species around the time when Gondwana split.

Many molecular markers have demonstrated substantial intraspecies diversity and the existence of geographically and genetically isolated populations in all Leishmania species tested so far. In particular the idea that Leishmania evolve predominantly clonally with only rare sexual recombination has repeatedly been questioned by the detection of hybrids, mosaic genotypes, and gene flow between populations and strong inbreeding and, finally, the detection of genetic recombination under laboratory conditions.

This chapter reviews the recent (mostly) molecular data that provide new insights into the evolution, taxonomy, phylogenetic, and population genetic relationships of Leishmania but also the questions raised by this knowledge. It also discusses the power of modern approaches, such as multilocus sequence analysis, multilocus microsatellite typing, and comparative genomics for studying the inter- and intraspecies variation of Leishmania parasites.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the many authors that have contributed to what we know today about the molecular evolution and phylogeny of Leishmania and whose work is not cited herein, in particular those who have worked with us, and all of those with whom we have had discussions about this subject. We acknowledge the financial support of the European Union (grants QLK2-CT-2001-01810, INCO-CT2005-015407, FP7-222895); of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHO 448/6 and 448/8); of Wellcome Trust (078742/Z05/Z and core support of the WT Sanger Institute WT098051 and WT206194); and of the Czech Grant Agency (16-18699S) and the European Research Council (CZ LL1601).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Institut für Mikrobiologie und Hygiene, Berlin, Germany

    Gabriele Schönian & Olivia Stark

  2. Biology Centre, Institute of Parasitology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Ceske Budějovice (Budweis), Czech Republic

    Julius Lukeš

  3. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

    James A. Cotton

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  1. Gabriele Schönian
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Correspondence to Gabriele Schönian .

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  1. Institute of Experimental Medicine, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela

    Alicia Ponte-Sucre

  2. Escuela Luis Razetti Fac de Medicine, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela

    Maritza Padrón-Nieves

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Schönian, G., Lukeš, J., Stark, O., Cotton, J.A. (2018). Molecular Evolution and Phylogeny of Leishmania. In: Ponte-Sucre, A., Padrón-Nieves, M. (eds) Drug Resistance in Leishmania Parasites. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74186-4_2

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