Fig. 4

Phylogenetic relationship of Babesia spp. detected in this study to other Babesia spp. based on a 290 bp partial sequence of the ITS2 region. The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the Kimura 2-parameter 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 analysed [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 tree(s) 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. A discrete Gamma distribution was used to model evolutionary rate differences among sites [5 categories (+G, parameter = 0.5229)]