PEET: Monography of the Families of Hirudinea (Leeches) with On-line Databasing and Development of Electronic Keys: A Program to Train the Hirudinologists of the Future

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0119329Siddall and Burreson Dr. Mark Siddall of the American Museum of Natural History and his co-PI Dr. Eugene Burreson of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are collaborating to assess and document the biodiversity of leech families of the world (the annelid order Hirudinea, with an estimated 1000 species worldwide). The basis for this work involves thorough determination and photodocumentation of leeches in natural history museums worldwide as well as several field expeditions to regions of poorly studied but high leech diversity globally. This work comes at a time when leeches have experienced renewed interest from the biomedical community and yetthe field is in danger of losing the knowledge of those few scientists who have devoted themselves to understanding the scope of the world's hirudifauna. Using various data-gathering technologies (for morphological and molecular sequence data) and data-analyzing algorithms, students will be trained in collecting, identifying and monographing species in the principal families, and will compile the information in a world-wide accessible database connecting taxon descriptions with images and publications related to them. Leeches occur in habitats that range from terrestrial to both marine and freshwater environments and are found on all continents. The remarkable diversity in morphology and behavior of leeches has been of interest to several fields of biology. The last fifteen years have seen an increase in the biomedical utility of leeches especially the promise of finding powerful anticoagulants and tumor-inhibiting antistasins in leech saliva. Leeches are enjoying a renaissance in their application (quite literally)to post-operative hematomas. Their use routinely has led to faster healing following the reattachment of tissues with microsurgical procedures. Leeches also are used extensively in neurobiological and developmental studies. So far, only two or three species of leech are exploited for these purposes, largely because the world's diversity and family relationships are not well understood (usually Hirudo medicinalis and Limnatis nilotica, the European and African medicinal leeches respectively). This grant seeks to make available that knowledge and to extend its scope in a comprehensive manner, while training a new generation of taxonomic specialists working in annelid systematics and biology.