Mitochondrial phylogenomics and mitogenome organization in the parasitoid wasp family Braconidae (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonoidea)

Abstract

Background Mitochondrial (mt) nucleotide sequence data has been by far the most common tool employed to investigate evolutionary relationships. While often considered to be more useful for shallow evolutionary scales, mt genomes have been increasingly shown also to contain valuable phylogenetic information about deep relationships. Further, mt genome organization provides another important source of phylogenetic information and gene reorganizations which are known to be relatively frequent within the insect order Hymenoptera. Here we used a dense taxon sampling comprising 148 mt genomes (132 newly generated) collectively representing members of most of the currently recognised subfamilies of the parasitoid wasp family Braconidae, which is one of the largest radiations of hymenopterans. We employed this data to investigate the evolutionary relationships within the family and to assess the phylogenetic informativeness of previously known and newly discovered mt gene rearrangements. Results Most subfamilial relationships and their composition obtained were similar to those recovered in a previous phylogenomic study, such as the restoration of Trachypetinae and the recognition of Apozyginae and Proteropinae as valid braconid subfamilies. We confirmed and detected phylogenetic signal in previously known as well as novel mt gene rearrangements, including mt rearrangements within the cyclostome subfamilies Doryctinae and Rogadinae. Conclusions Our results showed that both the mt genome DNA sequence data and gene organization contain valuable phylogenetic signal to elucidate the evolution within Braconidae at different taxonomic levels. This study serves as a basis for further investigation of mt gene rearrangements at different taxonomic scales within the family.

Enigma moth parasitoid: a new Australian cyclostome genus and species, Ovaustra aurantia Tetley, Glatz & Fagan Jeffries, gen. et sp. nov. (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) from Kangaroo Island

“…nov. (in red) within Mesostoinae sensu lato. Species in grey are directly from the 13 protein‐coding and two ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) complete matrix of Jasso‐Martínez et al (2022a), while those in black represent sequences of COI only, sourced from BOLD or Genbank. Clades other than the Mesostoinae s.l.…”

“…Unsurprisingly, given the inclusion of only COI sequences for the extra mesostoine sequences added to the dataset of Jasso‐Martínez et al (2022a), most internal nodes of the Mesostoinae s.l . + Maxfisheriinae clade have low support, and we do not attempt to use this analysis to draw any further conclusions about relationships within the clade.…”

“…See Table S2 for the full list of included sequences and database codes. This alignment was then aligned to the concatenated dataset of Jasso‐Martínez et al (2022a), which includes 13‐protein‐coding mitochondrial genes (including COI ) along with two ribosomal RNA sequences for an extremely broad variety of braconids. Using the best‐fitting partitions and models determined by Jasso‐Martínez et al (2022b) in their original analysis, a maximum likelihood analysis was conducted using IQTREE version 2.0.6 (Chernomor, von Haeseler, & Minh 2016; Minh et al 2020) and 1000 ultra‐fast bootstrap replicates (Hoang et al 2018) were run and displayed on the resulting tree.…”

“…+ Maxfischeriinae (Quicke et al 2020a, 2020b). Further, Doryctomorpha is recovered as a sister to a clade comprising Maxfischeria tricolor Papp, 1994, and three mesostoine genera in the mitogenome phylogeny of Jasso‐Martínez et al (2022a).…”

“…Recent analyses have strongly supported a monophyletic Mesostoinae s.l . + Maxfischeriinae clade through numerous multigene (Quicke et al 2020a) and next‐generation sequencing phylogenies (Jasso‐Martínez et al 2022a, 2022b). In these analyses, another Australian endemic braconid genu ( Maxfischeria Papp, 1994) nests within other mesostoine genera.…”