Little genetic divergence of the greater horseshoe bat Rhinolophus ferrumequinum from far-eastern Asia, with a preliminary report on genetic differentiation of R. ferrumequinum from Eurasia and northern Africa examined from cytochrome b sequences

Abstract

ABSTRACT. We obtained cytochrome b complete sequences (1140 bp) of the greater horseshoe bat Rhinolophus ferrumequinum from Korea (Jeju Island and mainland Korea), and these sequences were compared to corresponding sequences of R. ferrumequinum, obtained from GenBank, in order to examine genetic divergence among populations within R. ferrumequinum from far-eastern Asia and other parts of the range. Specimens from four populations in far-eastern Asia (Jeju, mainland Korea, northeastern China, and Japan) formed a far-eastern clade and were little differentiated, indicating that our results support a former subspecies classification, recognized R. f. korai and R. f. quelpartis as synonyms of R. f. nippon. In addition, we found that the eastern China clade from Henan is genetically distinct from the far-eastern clade, although individuals from Japan, northeastern China, and eastern China are known as R. f. nippon, and we propose further analyses with additional specimens from China to examine whether or not the eastern China clade is a subpopulation within R. f. nippon. On the other hand, R. ferrumequinum from Eurasia and northern Africa was found to be composed of four clades (far-eastern Asia, eastern China, central China, and western Asia -Europe -northern Africa), and average nucleotide distances between the first and other three clades were 2.15%, 4.10%, and 5.37% respectively. Thus, we found that genetic distances between these clades are correlated with geographic distances between them, and we concluded that further analysis of cytochrome b and other markers from additional specimens of R. ferrumequinum across distributional range is necessary to reexamine its population structure and subspecies classification.

Complete mitochondrial genomes of two subspecies ( Rhinolophus ferrumequinum nippon and Rhinolophus ferrumequinum tragatus ) of the greater horseshoe bat (Chiroptera: Rhinolophidae)

“…The similarities among their mitogenome sequences (D-loop region excluded) were approximately 99.9%, which is higher than 96.6% similarities with R. f. tragatus. The close relationships among R. f. nippon, R. f. quelpartis, and R. f. korai indicated that they might be the same subspecies, which is consistent with the result obtained by Koh et al (2014). …”

“…In far-eastern Asia, three subspecies, R. f. korai, R. f. quelpartis, and R. f. nippon are identified. Very low cytb differences indicated that R. f. korai and R. f. quelpartis are synonyms of R. f. nippon (Koh et al, 2014). Currently, complete mitogenomes of two subspecies R. f. korai (JN392460) and R. f. quelpartis (NC_020326) from Korea have been sequenced (Yoon et al, 2011(Yoon et al, , 2013.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary history of the greater horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, in Northeast Asia (v0.1)"

“…Previous studies and this study show South Korean, Japanese and Northeast Chinese R. ferrumequinum have very low genetic divergence (Sakai et al, 2003;Koh et al, 2014). Therefore, we regard bats from South Korea, Japan or Northeast China as a single geographic population.…”

“…Instead, combining the high Hri and non-significant positive Fu's Fs value, we inferred a bottlenecked event may have occurred in Northeast China (Liao et al, 2010). In regards to the South Korean population, we compared previous studies on R. ferrumequinum (Flanders et al, 2011;Sun et al, 2013;Koh et al, 2014) and found an expanding event was first detected at 0.12 Ma (95% CI 0.03-0.20 Ma), which corresponds to the relatively warm Eemian interglaciation (0.12-0.13 Ma) in the Pleistocene. as incomplete lineage sorting and ancestral polymorphism, which can also cause low divergence between populations from Northeast China and South Korea (Flanders et al, 2009).…”

“…Additionally, the Korea Strait separated the populations in Korea from those in Japan. Koh et al (2014) Manuscript to be reviewed ferrumequinum was deposited in GenBank. All field studies were approved by National Animal Research Authority in Northeast Normal University, China (approval number: NENU-20080416).…”