The first complete mitochondrial genome for the subfamily Limacodidae and implications for the higher phylogeny of Lepidoptera

Abstract

The mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) provides important information for understanding molecular evolution and phylogeny. To determine the systematic status of the family Limacodidae within Lepidoptera, we infer a phylogenetic hypothesis based on the complete mitogenome of Monema flavescens (Lepidoptera: Limacodidae). The mitogenome of M. flavescens is 15,396 base pairs (bp), and includes 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, and a control region (CR). The AT skew of this mitogenome is slightly negative and the nucleotide composition is also biased towards A + T nucleotides (80.5%). All PCGs are initiated by ATN codons, except for the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1) gene, which is initiated by CGA. All tRNAs display the typical clover-leaf structure characteristic of mitochondrial tRNAs, with the exception of trnS1 (AGN). The mitogenome CR is 401 bp and consists of several features common to Lepidoptera. Phylogenetic analysis using Bayesian Inference (BI) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) based on nucleotide and amino acid sequences of 13 mitochondrial PCGs indicates that M. flavescens belongs to Zygaenoidea. We obtain a well-supported phylogenetic tree consisting of Yponomeutoidea + (Tortricoidea + Zygaenoidea + (Papilionoidea + (Pyraloidea + (Noctuoidea + (Geometroidea + Bombycoidea))))).

The complete mitochondrial genome of Pidorus atratus (Lepidoptera: Zygaenoidea: Zygaenidae)

“…The phylogenetic tree of 44 lepidopteran species including the P. atratus of this study and other four determined Zygaenoidea species, which represent 11 lepidopteran superfamilies were reconstructed based on the concatenated 13 PCG nucleotide sequence data with the Bayesian inference (BI) method, using three Hepialidae species as the outgroups (see Figure 1 for details). The result showed the P. atratus formed a monophyletic group with other four Zygaenoidea species with strong support value, which contradicted with the result of previous study in that the two Zygaenoidea families, Zygaenidae and Limacodidae, constituted a paraphyletic group (Liu et al 2016).…”

“…Zygaenoidea is one of the superfamilies of lepidopterans, consisting of about 12 families, including the Zygaenidae and Limacodidae (van Nieukerken et al 2011). Due to their unique biological characteristics, Zygaenoidea is of great interest to lepidopterists and evolutionary biologists, with its internal phylogeny and phylogenetic relationships with its closely related lepidopteran groups still standing as a controversial issue (Liu et al 2016). As far as we knew, up to the present, more than 200 complete or near-complete lepidopteran mitogenomes have been determined, however, among these determined mitogenomes, only four are for the Zygaenoidea moths (Tang et al 2014;Liu et al 2016;Peng et al 2017).…”

Molecular cloning and expression analysis of the highly conserved eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF‐5A) from Antheraea pernyi

“…An increasing number of housekeeping genes are being identified, including myosin heavy chain type II genes (Ruiz‐Trillo et al ), ribosomal proteins (Hou et al ), myosin light chains 1 and 2 (Liu et al ; Liu et al ), enolase (Liu et al ), phosphoserine aminotransferase (Wang et al ), sans fille (Li et al ), and 14–3‐3 zeta (Liu et al ), and these are providing new molecular tools to assess evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic analysis based on eIF‐5A family amino acid sequences resulted in a clear separation between vertebrates and invertebrates, consistent with traditional classification and other molecular data (Liu et al ). This suggests that eIF‐5A might also be useful for phylogenetic analysis.…”

Mesozoic mitogenome rearrangements and freshwater mussel (Bivalvia: Unionoidea) macroevolution

“…In recent decades, complete mitochondrial genome sequences have been published for a wide range of taxa, enabling reconstruction of shallow and deep phylogenies in both vertebrates and invertebrates (e.g., Jacobsen et al 2014;Liu et al 2016). However, the number of available mitogenomes for Unionida is low, particularly for M-type genomes (Froufe et al 2016;Fonseca et al 2016;Lopes-Lima et al 2017b;Huang et al 2019).…”