Rhinosporidiasis

Rhinosporidiasis, also known as “water mould”, caused by Rhinosporidium  seeberi, an obligate fungus, affects both man and animals. R. seeberi, was  discovered by Guillermo Seeber (1900) in Argentina as a protozoan parasite  producing nasal polyp. Ashworth (1923) described that rhinosporidiosis  is caused by a fungus on the basis of morphologic and histochemical  reactions. It was named R. seeberi in the honor of G Seeber. The taxonomy of  the fungus is controversial however the fungus was placed in Ascomycetes  fungi (Dodge, 1935). Phylogenetic analysis proved that the etiological agent  of rhinosporidiosis of human beings is R. seeberi, a member of the order  Dermocystida in the class Mesomycetozoae (Herr et al., 1999). R. equi and R.  ayyari names were given to the strains isolated from rhinosporidiosis of horses  and buffaloes, respectively. R. kinealyi when obtained from rhinosporidial  affected tissue while Vanbreuseghem named as R. amazonicum (Minchin and  Fantham, 1905). Now all these four names have been replaced by R. seeberi.  Rhinosporadiosis has been reviewed by Verma and Iyer (1989) and Tiwari  et al., (2015). Rhinosporadisis is endemic in India and Srilanka (Shetty and  Mohan, 2013). A portion of R.seebri 18sRNA gene directly from infected  tissue was amplified. The analysis of the aligned sequence and inference of  phylogentic relationship showed that R.seebri is a protest from a novel clade  of parasites that infect fish and amphibians. The data supported that R.seebri is not a classic fungus rather the first known human pathogen from the  DRIPs clade of aquatic protistan parasites (Ichthysporea) (Fedricks et al.,  2020).