Molecular identification of Echinococcus species from eastern and southern Qinghai, China, based on the mitochondrial cox1 gene

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP, in western China), which is the largest and highest plateau on Earth, is a highly epidemic region for Echinococcus spp. We collected 70 Echinococcus samples from humans, dogs, sheep, yaks, plateau pikas, and voles in eastern and southern Qinghai and genotyped them using the mitochondrial DNA marker cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene and maximum parsimony and Bayesian reconstruction methods. Based on the 792-bp sequence matrix, we recorded 124 variable sites, of which, 115 were parsimony-informative. Thirty-four haplotypes (H1-H34) were detected, of which H1-H15, H16-H17, and H18-H34 belonged to Echinococcus shiquicus, Echinococcus multilocularis, and Echinococcus granulosus, respectively. Within 26 human isolates, three were identified as E. multilocularis and 23 were E. granulosus. We also detected a dual infection case in a dog with E. multilocularis and E. granulosus. The intraspecific haplotype (Hd +/- SD) and nucleotide (Nd +/- SD) diversity of E. shiquicus (0.947 +/- 0.021; 0.00441 +/- 0.00062) was higher than that for E. granulosus (0.896 +/- 0.038; 0.00221 +/- 0.00031) and E. multilocularis (0.286 +/- 0.196; 0.00036 +/- 0.00025). Moreover, the haplotype network of E. shiquicus showed a radial feature rather than a divergent feature in a previous study, indicating this species in the QTP has also evolved with bottleneck effects.