Higher-level phylogeny of paraneopteran insects inferred from mitochondrial genome sequences

Abstract

Mitochondrial (mt) genome data have been proven to be informative for animal phylogenetic studies but may also suffer from systematic errors, due to the effects of accelerated substitution rate and compositional heterogeneity. We analyzed the mt genomes of 25 insect species from the four paraneopteran orders, aiming to better understand how accelerated substitution rate and compositional heterogeneity affect the inferences of the higher-level phylogeny of this diverse group of hemimetabolous insects. We found substantial heterogeneity in base composition and contrasting rates in nucleotide substitution among these paraneopteran insects, which complicate the inference of higher-level phylogeny. The phylogenies inferred with concatenated sequences of mt genes using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods and homogeneous models failed to recover Psocodea and Hemiptera as monophyletic groups but grouped, instead, the taxa that had accelerated substitution rates together, including Sternorrhyncha (a suborder of Hemiptera), Thysanoptera, Phthiraptera and Liposcelididae (a family of Psocoptera). Bayesian inference with nucleotide sequences and heterogeneous models (CAT and CAT + GTR), however, recovered Psocodea, Thysanoptera and Hemiptera each as a monophyletic group. Within Psocodea, Liposcelididae is more closely related to Phthiraptera than to other species of Psocoptera. Furthermore, Thysanoptera was recovered as the sister group to Hemiptera.

Characterization of the Activity Spectrum of MON 88702 and the Plant-Incorporated Protectant Cry51Aa2.834_16

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Genomic data do not support comb jellies as the sister group to all other animals

“…We investigated whether previous studies supporting Ctenophora-sister were conducted using adequately fitting substitution models. Using three exemplar datasets, which we call Ryan-Choano, Moroz-3D, and Whelan-6-Choano (details are provided below and in Methods), we compared the relative fit of site-homogeneous and siteheterogeneous models using Bayesian cross-validation (36, 37), a routine statistical technique used to evaluate the predictive performance of a probabilistic model, which has been commonly used in the context of phylogenetics (23,24,(38)(39)(40)(41). Using 10 cross-validation replicates, we found that in all cases, site-heterogeneous models fit these data significantly better than the site-homogeneous models that previous studies mostly relied upon ( Table 1).…”

Higher‐level phylogeny and evolutionary history of Pentatomomorpha (Hemiptera: Heteroptera) inferred from mitochondrial genome sequences

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