Presence of highly repetitive DNA sequences in Tribolium flour-beetles

Abstract

Digestion of genomic DNA from seven species of Tribolium (Coleoptera) with Sau3AI, TaqI and C/al restriction enzymes shows the presence of remarkable amounts of highly repetitive DNA sequences in these species. In Tribolium freemani the sequences are tandemly repeated with a satellite monomer of 166 bp, A-T rich (70.5 per cent), representing 31 per cent of the total genome and located in centromeric chromosome areas as demonstrated by in situ hybridization. The sequence has the potential to form secondary structures such as stems or cruciforms due to the presence of frequent inverted repeats. Tribolium castaneum, T. anaphe and T. madens show homologous sequences to T freemani satellite DNA but T confusum, T audax, T brevicornis and other tenebrionid beetles, such as Tenebrio mo/itor and Misolampus goudoti, do not. A phylogenetic dendrogram, based on the homology and abundance of highly repetitive sequences deduced by dot-blot hybridization, chemotaxonomic and karyological characters, is proposed for the seven studied species of Tribo/ium.

Relationships among pest flour beetles of the genus Tribolium (Tenebrionidae) inferred from multiple molecular markers

“…These results support the relationships suggested by Hinton (1948), and contradict the phylogenetic hypotheses of later studies based on chemotaxonomy (Howard, 1987), isozyme cladistics (Wool, 1982), and satellite DNAs (Juan, et al, 1993). The mitochondrial phylogeny of Meštrović et al (2006) also strongly supports the monophyly of the castaneum and confusum species groups, although using parsimony and Bayesian methods they obtain conflicting species relationships within the confusum group.…”

“…Alternatively, isozyme data have suggested a closer relationship between T. confusum and T. brevicornis, with T. castaneum basal to this pair and to the confusum group species T. destructor (Wool, 1982). These relationships were also weakly supported when the chemotaxonomic evidence (Howard, 1987) was combined with satellite DNA data (Juan et al, 1993). Several lines of evidence have supported monophyly of the castaneum species group.…”

Postcopulatory, prezygotic isolation: intraspecific and interspecific sperm precedence in Tribolium spp., flour beetles

“…T. freemani is a closely related species that is capable of producing abundant numbers of sterile hybrids in reciprocal crosses with T. castaneum (Hinton, 1948;Nakitta eta!., 1981;Brownlee & Sokoloff, 1988;Juan et al, 1993;. These species are most easily identified by their large size difference: T freemani is almost three times as massive as T castaneum (Brown-lee & Sokoloff, 1988;.…”

Comparative FISH analysis in five species of Eyprepocnemidine grasshoppers

“…Its presence or absence, and the divergence of sequences shared among species, may be powerful tools, throwing light on the evolutionary relationships among closely related species. Such information has proven to be useful in a variety of organisms, for example, insects (Bachmann and Sperlich, 1993;Juan et al, 1993;Bachmann et al, 1994;Pons et al, 1997), fishes (Garrido-Ramos et al, 1995;de la Herrán et al, 2001;Lanfredi et al, 2001), birds (Madsen et al, 1992), mammals (Hamilton et al, 1992;Wijers et al, 1993;Volobouev et al, 1995;Lee et al, 1999), and plants (Galasso et al, 2001).…”