Taxonomia Integrativa, Filogenia e Paleodistribuição de Capilarídeos

Abstract

There are more than 300 species of capillaries in various vertebrate groups (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) all over the world. The difficulty of identification, by the few taxonomically informative structures and their small size, make the task laborious and the definition controversial. Thus, its taxonomy is one of the most complex among the Nematoda. Findings of capillary eggs are reported in archaeological material both in the Old and New World, mainly in Europe and South America. Despite numerous findings, there is little refinement in the diagnosis of the species due to the few works that characterize the main egg morphology identification structure in archaeological material. The main proposal of this project is to provide basic information on the integrative taxonomy of capillaries, based on the morphological and morphometric characterization of the eggs, as well as the development of an Artificial Intelligence methodology applied to reference species from biological collections, to construct a discrimination model of the morphotypes found in archaeological sites. To achieve the objectives, eggs of reference species from two institutional collections, Helminthological Collection of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (CHIOC) and Collection helminthologique du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris (MNHN), were examined by light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, statistical analysis data and application of Artificial Intelligence methodology. The thesis is presented in the format of "collection", composed of 4 articles. The first article was a sitematic review of the global paleoepidemiological scenario of capillary species, as well as showing the current taxonomy of genus by phylogenetic analysis, alluding to the difficulties encountered in identifying species in ancient material and classifying them in genera. The second article makes the morphological characterization by light microscopy of the specimens of the two institutional biological Collections, being a total of 28 species distributed in 8 genera, in addition to developing an Artificial Intelligence methodology. The similarities and differences of the species and genera are exposed and discussed with statistical analysis and a decision tree is created for species identification. In the third article the CHIOC eggs were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, which shows the observed differences between light microscopy. It is a tool that better discriminates the egg morphotypes and helps to understand its ultrastructure but does not yet replace the light microscope in routine practice. In the fourth article, New World and Old World sites are analyzed where capillary eggs are identified. Thus, an analysis of the eggs for identification is made. The results provide the basis for establishing the relationship of capillaries with their human and animal hosts in the past, establishing a scenario of paleontribution of infection. As conclusion, the study may support future research on the identification of both modern and archaeological capillaries.