Molecular characterization of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Trichomonas vaginalis</Emphasis> isolates from the Philippines

Trichomonas vaginalis is a human urogenital pathogen that causes trichomoniasis, the most common nonviral parasitic sexually transmitted infection in the world. Presently, there are no reports on comparative sequence analysis as well as on the identification of phylogenetic positions of T. vaginalis isolates from the Philippines relative to known trichomonads. In this study, 5.8S rDNA and the flanking internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of 57 T. vaginalis isolates were sequenced. The phylogenetic positions of the isolates relative to known trichomonads were determined using the model-based (GTR+Γ+I) neighbor-joining, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian-inference analyses and the nonmodel-based maximum parsimony analysis. Construction of a phylogenetic tree showed the clustering of all the sequences in one branch together with other T. vaginalis strains obtained through basic local alignment search tool search. Sequencing of the 5.8S rDNA gene and the flanking ITS1and ITS2 regions of T. vaginalis isolates from the Philippines demonstrated low genetic polymorphism. However, comparison of the ribosomal DNA sequences may have implications on some phenotypic characteristics of T. vaginalis.