Complete mitochondrial genome of the black‐tailed hornet, Vespa ducalis (Hymenoptera: Vespidae): Genomic comparisons in Vespoidea

Abstract

We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the black‐tailed hornet, Vespa ducalis (Hymenoptera: Vespidae). The genome was 15,779‐bp long and contained typical sets of genes [13 protein‐coding genes (PCGs), 22 tRNAs, and 2 rRNAs]. The V. ducalis A + T‐rich region was 166‐bp long and was the shortest of all sequenced Vespoidea genomes, including Vespa. The genome was highly biased toward A/T nucleotides—80.1 % in the whole genome, 77.8 % in PCGs, 83.4–85.6 % in RNAs, and 92.8 % in the A + T‐rich region. These values are well within the typical range for genes and regions of Vespoidea mitogenomes. Start and stop codons in several Vespa species—including V. ducalis—were diversified, despite these species belonging to the same genus. In comparison with the ancestral mitogenomes, Vespa mitogenomes—including that of V. ducalis—showed substantial gene rearrangement; however, we detected no gene rearrangement among Vespa species. We conducted phylogenetic reconstruction based on concatenated sequences of 13 PCGs and two rRNAs (12,755 bp) in available species of Vespoidea—21 species in six subfamilies in two families (Vespidae and Formicidae). The Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood (ML) methods revealed that each family formed strong monophyletic groups [Bayesian posterior probability (BPP) = 1; ML, 100 %]. Moreover, V. ducalis and V. mandarinia formed a strong sister group (BPP = 1; ML, 94 %).

Mitochondrial composition of and diffusion limiting factors of three social wasp genera Polistes, Ropalidia, and Parapolybia (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)

“…Polistinae forms a sister relationship with Vespinae, which is supported by previous studies on both morphological characteristics and molecular data [22,60,61]. In addition, within the subfamily Polistinae, the relationship (Ropalidia + Parapolybia) is concordant with previous morphological analysis of Polistinae that the two genera belong to one tribe [4,21].…”

Complete mitochondrial DNA sequence of the tropical hornet Vespa affinis (Insecta, Hymenoptera)

“… 2017 ; Kim et al. 2017a , 2017b ; Takahashi et al. 2017 ) was shown to be similar to the result by the combined analysis based on 45 morphological characters and six genes (Perrard et al.…”

“…Phylogenetic analysis using the 13 mitochondrial proteincoding genes from 11 closely related taxa of Vespidae (Cameron et al 2008;Chen et al 2016;Song et al 2016;Wei et al 2016;Zhou et al 2016;Fan et al 2017;Haddad et al 2017;Kim et al 2017aKim et al , 2017bTakahashi et al 2017) was shown to be similar to the result by the combined analysis based on 45 morphological characters and six genes (Perrard et al 2013) (Figure 1). Although more high resolution sequence data from more species may help resolve these differences.…”

A Bioinformatics Study to Detect the Genetic Characteristics of Vespa Hornets (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)

“…Previous studies support these findings, the phylogenetic analysis based on 45 morphological characters and molecular analysis showed the presence of close relationships between V. mandarinia and V. ducalis while the other three Vespa species were placed in different groups (Perrard et al, 2013). Based on the nucleotide sequences of the 13 protein-coding genes, close relationships between V. mandarinia, V. ducalis and V. affinis, were found (Okuyama et al, 2017;Takahashi et al, 2018), and between V. mandarinia and V. ducalis (Kim et al, 2017;Zhang, Huang, Chen & Li, 2018). On the contrary with the current study, a close relationship was found between V. mandarinia and V. orientalis based on the un-gapped sequences of a multiple sequence alignment (Haddad et al, 2017), while V. orientalis and V. velutina were placed in close groups based on the nucleotide sequences of the 13 protein-coding genes (Takahashi et al, 2018).…”

“…The mtDNA of some Vespa species have been sequenced including: V. mandarinia (Chen, Wei, & Liu, 2016), V. orientalis (Haddad et al, 2017), V. affinis (Okuyama, Martin, & Takahashi, 2017), V. ducalis (Kim, Jeong, Jeong, Kim, & Kim, 2017), and V. velutina (Takahashi, Okuyama, Minoshima, & Takahashi, 2018). The phylogenetic relationships between Vespa have been studied based on morphological characters (Perrard, Pickett, Villemant, Kojima, & Carpenter, 2013) while few studies have focused on the genetic characteristics of these hornets.…”