Bringing order to chaos: A new classification of avian schistosomes and their genetic lineages in the context of swimmer’s itch
Description
This dataset provides four multiple-sequence alignments used for the global phylogenetic revision of avian schistosomes (family Schistosomatidae), parasitic flatworms that infect birds and some may cause swimmer's itch (cercarial dermatitis) in humans. The alignments were generated from 184 newly obtained sequences and combined with publicly available GenBank sequences for avian schistosomes retrieved up to April 2025. They were used to generate phylogenetic tree: Figures 1, 2, S1 and S2 of the associated manuscript. The four alignment files are: (1) a concatenated cox1/ITS/28S alignment of 141 terminals representing 88 species/lineages across 1,588 characters, used for the summary phylogenetic tree; (2) a cox1 alignment of 247 terminals representing 88 species/lineages across 420 characters; (3) an ITS1-5.8S rRNA-ITS2 alignment of 181 terminals representing 60 species/lineages across 600 characters; and (4) a 28S rDNA alignment of 160 terminals representing 81 species/lineages across 548 characters. All the sequences were aligned using MAFFT v7 in Geneious Prime 2025.1.1, manually trimmed, and filtered with Gblock 0.91b under relaxed settings to remove poorly aligned regions.