New Mitogenomes of Two Chinese Stag Beetles (Coleoptera, Lucanidae) and Their Implications for Systematics

Abstract

Although conspicuous and well-studied, stag beetles have been slow to join the genomic era. In this study, mitochondrial genomes of two stag beetles, Sinodendron yunnanense and Prosopocoilus confucius, are sequenced for the first time. Both of their genomes consisted of 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNA genes (tRNAs), 2 ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), and a control region. The mitogenome of S. yunnanense was 16,921 bp in length, and P. confucius was 16,951 bp. The location of the gene trnL(UUR), between the A + T–rich and control region in S. yunnanense, is the first observed in Lucanidae. In P. confucius, an unexpected noncoding region of 580 bp was discovered. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference on the 13 mitochondrial PCGs were used to infer the phylogenetic relationships among 12 representative stag beetles and three scarab beetles. The topology of the two phylogenetic trees was almost identical: S. yunnanense was recovered as the most basal Lucanid, and the genus Prosopocoilus was polyphyletic due to P. gracilis being recovered sister to the genera Dorcus and Hemisodorcus. The phylogenetic results, genetic distances and mitogenomic characteristics call into question the cohesion of the genus Prosopocoilus. The genetic resources and findings herein attempts to redress understudied systematics and mitogenomics of the stag beetles.

Complete mitochondrial genome of Prismognathus prossi (Coleoptera: Lucanidae) with phylogenetic implications

“…In particular, complete mitogenomic data of Lucanidae is available for only few species despite their great evolutionary and systematic interest. So far, just 18 lucanid mitogenomes including seven complete ones have been reported (Sheffield et al 2009, Kim et al 2013, Lin et al 2017.…”

The mitochondrial genome of Ephestia elutella (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Pyralidae)

“…MG748858) is 15345 bp in length, consisting of 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 2 ribosomal RNA genes (rRNA), 22 transfer RNA genes (tRNA), and 1 control region. Twenty three genes (trnM, trnI, nad2, trnW, cox1, trnL2, cox2, trnK, trnD, atp8, atp6, cox3, trnG, nad3, trnA, trnR, trnN, trnS1, trnE, trnT, nad6, cytB, and trnS2) were found to be encoded by the majority strand and the other 14 genes (trnQ, trnC, trnY, trnF, nad5, trnH, nad4, nad4L, trnP, nad1, trnL1, rrnL, trnV, and rrnS) by minority strand, those is similar to that of other insects (Lin et al 2017; Living Prairie Mitogenomics Consortium 2017; Singh et al 2017). Overall nucleotide compositions of the majority strand are 38.6% of A, 11.77% of C, 42.05% of T and 7.58% of G, with an AT content of 80.65%.…”

Peer Review #2 of "Accessible molecular phylogenomics at no cost: obtaining 14 new mitogenomes for the ant subfamily Pseudomyrmecinae from public data (v0.1)"

“…Mitochondrial genomes are poorly sampled for many taxa and therefore our current knowledge about evolutionary biology of many clades could be improved with the use of public data. Being primarily maternally inherited and non-recombinant, such sequences are often used to study evolutionary biology (Finstermeier et al, 2013;Krzemińska et al, 2017), population genetics (Pečnerová et al, 2017;Kılınç et al, 2018), phylogeography (Chang et al, 2017;Fields et al, 2018), systematics (Lin et al, 2017;Crainey et al, 2018) and conservation (Moritz, 1994;Rubinoff, 2006;Rosel et al, 2017) of various clades (Avise, 1994), specially from subsampled taxa (Gotzek, Clarke & Shoemaker, 2010;Duan, Peng & Qian, 2016) and non-model organisms (Prosdocimi et al, 2012;Tilak et al, 2014;Plese et al, 2018).…”