Two mitochondrial genomes of Taiwanese rhinoceros beetles, Oryctes rhinoceros and Eophileurus chinensis (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae)

Abstract

Two mitochondrial genomes of the dynastine beetles, Oryctes rhinoceros (Linnaeus, 1758) and Eophileurus chinensis (Faldermann, 1835), were assembled via high-throughput sequencing (HTS). Each of the mitogenomes has 37 genes, showing standard gene order and annotation as the other insects, except for the transfer genes, presenting tQ-tI-tM order. To examine their phylogenetic positions, 118 public mitogenomes of Scarabaeidae were used to infer a ML tree. Overall, our scarabaeid phylogeny reveals clear relationships with high nodal supports, and the two rhinoceros beetles are both grouped with the subfamily Dynastinae. The feeding habit of the two clades seems to represent coprophagous and phytophagous types. However, polyphyletic relationships were observed in the subfamily Melolothinae and in the tribes of Onthophagini and Oniticellini. Further systematic revision is needed.

The Mitochondrial Genomes of 18 New Pleurosticti (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Exhibit a Novel trnQ-NCR-trnI-trnM Gene Rearrangement and Clarify Phylogenetic Relationships of Subfamilies within Scarabaeidae

“…We conclude that there was no significant gene rearrangement in coprophagous or phytophagous scarab beetles except in the subfamily Dynastinae. A similar gene translocation has already been reported in the first sequenced Dynastinae subfamily species, O. rhinoceros [19], and the two recently reported Taiwanese rhinoceros beetles O. rhinoceros and Eophileurus chinensis [18]. Until now, there were only these three complete mitogenome sequences from the subfamily Dynastinae available in the NCBI and, as reported here, all of them shared this gene organization with our nine new sequenced mt genomes.…”

“…In this study, we sequenced and presented 18 new scarab beetle species and sub-species belonging to the subfamilies Cetoniinae and Dynastinae to establish a comparative study and investigate the high-level relationships within Scarabaeidae based on the mitochondrial genome. Until now, there were too few papers that reported the complete mitochondrial genome of scarab beetles (especially among Pleurosticti) to be able to deeply analyze the genome structure, composition, and the phylogenetic relationships [18,19,29,43,45,64,65]. Our results show that the size of the mt genome varied widely among the examined species, ranging from 16,422 bp (Mecynorhina polyphemus) to 19,468 bp (Jumnos ruckeri) in Cetoniinae, and from 16,785 bp (Megasoma elephas elephas) to 20,396 bp (Oryctes nasicornis) in Dynastinae.…”

“…For this reason, the taxonomy and phylogeny of Sericinae and Melolonthinae have been the subject of scientific debate during past years [6,[18][19][20][21]. Recent research papers propose to elevate the tribe Sericini to a subfamily rank [6,14], and at the same time it was recommended to collect new data on Dynastinae to resolve its phylogenetic relationship with Rutelinae.…”

“…However, to date, the number of mt genomes among phytophagous scarab beetles is underrepresented in GenBank (accessed on 4 September 2021), especially for the subfamily Dynastinae (only three complete mt genome sequences: one of Eophileurus chinensis and two of Oryctes rhinoceros) and Cetoniinae (five mt genomes: two of Osmoderma opicum and three of Protaetia brevitarsis) compared with the rest of the subfamilies of the family Scarabaeidae. However, these two groups show some differences in mt gene arrangement, in particular, the gene rearrangement of trnQ-trnI-trnM in Dynastinae [18,19]. We reanalyzed all species of Rutelinae and Melolonthinae, Scarabaeinae and Aphodiinae in NCBI to determine if mt gene rearrangements were present in other groups of the family Scarabaeidae, but no gene rearrangement in these subfamilies were found.…”

Genomic resources for population analyses of an invasive insect pest Oryctes rhinoceros

“…Over the last few years, next-generation sequencing (NGS) experiments have been done for different CBR collections, accumulating data from the reduced-representation sequencing (Restriction site-Associated DNA sequencing, RAD-Seq; Genotyping-by-Sequencing, GBS) 7,9 , as well as RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) [10][11][12][13] and Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) [14][15][16] . Until recently, however, absence of a reference genome assembly for CRB's nuclear and mitochondrial genomes have prevented the direct comparison and collation of different datasets.…”