Due to difficulties concerning morphological identification
of planorbid snails of the genus
Biomphalaria
, and given a high variation of characters and in the organs with muscular
tissue, we designed specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers for
Brazilian snail hosts of
Schistosoma mansoni
from available sequences of internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) of the
ribosomal RNA gene. From the previous sequencing of the ITS2 region, one
primer was designed to anchor in the 5.8S conserved region and three other
species-specific primers in the 28S region, flanking the ITS2 region. These
four primers were simultaneously used in the same reaction (Multiplex-PCR),
under high stringency conditions. Amplification of the ITS2 region of
Biomphalaria
snails produced distinct profiles (between 280 and 350 bp) for
B. glabrata
,
B. tenagophila
and
B. straminea
. The present study demonstrates that Multiplex-PCR of ITS2-DNAr showed
to be a promising auxiliary tool for the morphological identification of
Biomphalaria
snails, the intermediate hosts of
S. mansoni
.
