Fig. 1

Phylogenetic relationship of Hepatozoon canis detected in this study to other Hepatozoon spp. based on a 325 bp partial sequence of the 18S rRNA gene. The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the Hasegawa-Kishino-Yano model [47]. Sequences are presented by GenBank accession number, host species and country of origin. The diamond signs indicate the sequences derived from this study. The bootstrap consensus tree inferred from 1000 replicates [48] is taken to represent the evolutionary history of the taxa analyzed [48]. Branches corresponding to partitions reproduced in less than 70% bootstrap replicates are collapsed. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (1000 replicates) are shown next to the branches [48]. Initial trees for the heuristic search were obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using the Maximum Composite Likelihood (MCL) approach, and then selecting the topology with superior log likelihood value