Morphology of obligate ectosymbionts reveals Paralaxus gen. nov.: A new circumtropical genus of marine stilbonematine nematodes

Stilbonematinae are a subfamily of conspicuous marine nematodes, distinguished by a coat of sulphur-oxidizing bacterial ectosymbionts on their cuticle. As most nematodes, the worm hosts have a relatively simple anatomy and few taxonomically informative characters, and this has resulted in numerous taxonomic reassignments and synonymizations. Recent studies using a combination of morphological and molecular traits have helped to improve the taxonomy of Stilbonematinae but also raised questions on the validity of several genera. Here, we describe a new circumtropically distributed genus Paralaxus (Stilbonematinae) with three species: Paralaxus cocos sp. nov., P. bermudensis sp. nov. and P. columbae sp. nov. We used single worm metagenomes to generate host 18S rRNA and cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) as well as symbiont 16S rRNA gene sequences. Intriguingly, COI alignments and primer matching analyses suggest that the COI is not suitable for PCR-based barcoding approaches in Stilbonematinae as the genera have a highly diverse base composition and no conserved primer sites. The phylogenetic analyses of all three gene sets, however, confirm the morphological assignments and support the erection of the new genus Paralaxus as well as corroborate the status of the other stilbonematine genera. Paralaxus most closely resembles the stilbonematine genus Laxus in overlapping sets of diagnostic features but can be distinguished from Laxus by the morphology of the genus-specific symbiont coat. Our re-analyses of key parameters of the symbiont coat morphology as character for all Stilbonematinae genera show that with amended descriptions, including the coat, highly reliable genus assignments can be obtained.