Plasmodium Marchiafava & Celli, 1885

Chavatte, Jean-Marc, Grès, Virginie, Snounou, Georges, Chabaud, Alain & Landau, Irène, 2009, Plasmodium (Apicomplexa) of the skylark (Alauda arvensis), Zoosystema 31 (2), pp. 369-383 : 371-372

Genus Plasmodium Marchiafava & Celli, 1885

REMARKS

All the Plasmodium parasites were found within erythrocytes, and except for a few rings none were seen in reticulocytes. The infected RBC were at times deformed, rounded or discoloured by certain parasites, but the deformability observed was not more pronounced than that observed in other birds such as the magpie ( Chavatte et al. 2007) or the sparrow ( Landau et al. 2003). On the other hand, the red blood cell nucleus was often slightly tilted even by parasites that did not truly displace it.

For the known Plasmodium species , only the main characters are briefly described.

Molecular biology studies ( Martinsen et al. 2007) evidenced that some of the avian Plasmodium sub-genera created by Corradetti et al. (1963) are polyphyletic and until the situation is clarified we prefer not to use them.