Fig. 1

Alignment of the partial 18S rRNA gene amplicons of Babesia spp. and other related species. The upstream primer-1 (in red), upstream primer-2 (in blue), the fluorescein/LCRed 640 probes and the downstream primer are indicated in the top of the boxes. Dots indicate nucleotides identical to the primers and probes, and the dashes denote the deletion of the nucleotides. The upstream primers and two probes are used as the indicated sequences while the downstream primer is used as antisense oligonucleotide. While the probes and downstream primer show minimum mismatch with Babesia spp. and other related species, the upstream primers (−1 and −2) have 0–1 nucleotide mismatch with Babesia spp. but 6–16 nucleotide mismatches with the related non- Babesia species