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. 2016 Oct 13;7:1569. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2016.01569

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Copyright © 2016 Marden, McClure, Beka and Graf.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Hirudo verbana Digestive Tract. Schematic of the leech digestive tract (modified from Nelson and Graf, 2012 and Maltz et al., 2014). The ingested blood meal is stored in the crop where it forms a highly viscous intraluminal fluid (ILF) consisting of densely packed erythrocytes (dark circles surrounded by autofluorescence, examples indicated with arrow heads in insets). Fluorescence in situ hybridization micrographs of the leech crop describe (A) thick layers of mucus (red arrows) near the crop epithelium (dashed line) that develop after feeding and (B) circulating hemocytes (blue arrows) within the ILF that contain bacterial cells (green arrows). DAPI (blue), sWGA (red), and EUB338 (green). Scale bars = 10 μm.