Mark E. Siddall

Importance to Hirudotherapy

Mark E. Siddall is a Canadian biologist who joined the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an assistant curator in 1999 and served as a curator there until 2020 (Wikipedia). His research has addressed the evolution and systematics of blood parasites and leeches, together with systematic theory. Much of his work applied molecular data to taxonomic problems of biomedical relevance. With Trontelj, Utevsky and Nkamany he used mitochondrial sequences and nuclear microsatellites to show that commercially available medicinal leeches marketed as Hirudo medicinalis are in fact Hirudo verbana, and that there are at least three species of European medicinal leech — findings with consequences for decades of laboratory research, for conservation and for regulatory statutes, given that the medicinal leech is cleared in the United States as a prescription medical device (PMID 17426015). With Worthen, Johnson and Graf he identified Aeromonas jandaei as the dominant culturable gut symbiont of the North American medicinal leech Macrobdella decora across a broad geographic range, noting unexpected specificity between leeches and Aeromonas species (PMID 17114316), and he later co-authored a multi-locus phylogenetic analysis resolving the blood-feeding genus Placobdella as monophyletic and sister to a clade formed by Haementeria and Helobdella (PMID 28666786).