The phylogeny of Anophelinae revisited: inferences about the origin and classification of Anopheles (Diptera: Culicidae)

Abstract

Harbach, R.E., Kitching, I.J.. (2016). The phylogeny of Anophelinae revisited: inferences about the origin and classification of Anopheles (Diptera: Culicidae). -Zoologica Scripta, 45, 34-47. The evolution of anopheline mosquitoes (Culicidae: Anophelinae) has been the subject of speculation and study for decades, but a comprehensive phylogeny of these insects is far from complete. The results of phylogenetic studies based on morphological and molecular data sets are conspicuously ambiguous. Here, we revisit the phylogenetic relationships of anopheline mosquitoes using state-of-the-art software and cladistic methods to analyse the data set of Harbach & Kitching (2005). We present a refined interpretation of relationships based on analyses of a revised data set that includes an additional species. Implied weighting analyses were conducted with TNT with the concavity constant K ranging from 1 to 33. We determined the optimal K value by summing the GC supports for each MPC and selected the tree with the highest support, K = 30, as the preferred cladogram. We then collapsed the branches with GC support < 1 to obtain the 'best' topography of relationships. Genus Chagasia is the basalmost taxon of Anophelinae, and genus Anopheles is recovered as monophyletic but only if Anopheles implexus is excluded and genus Bironella is subordinated within it. The Afrotropical An. implexus is recovered as the sister to all other anophelines, and Christya Theobald, stat. nov., is elevated from synonymy with Anopheles Meigen as a subgenus to accommodate it. The other anophelines comprise two large clades. The first includes the reciprocally monophyletic subgenera Kerteszia + Nyssorhynchus; the second consists of subgenus Cellia as the sister to a heterogeneous clade that includes genus Bironella and subgenera Anopheles, Baimaia, Lophopodomyia and Stethomyia of genus Anopheles. The sister relationship of Cellia and the heterogeneous clade is lost when the branches with GC <1 are collapsed. The monophyly and non-monophyly of the informal subordinate taxa of subgenera Nyssorhynchus, Cellia and Anopheles, and also evolutionary scenarios, are discussed in relation to previous studies.

Multi-rate Poisson Tree Processes for single-locus species delimitation under Maximum Likelihood and Markov Chain Monte Carlo

“…The molecular systematics of the example taxa, vary from wellstudied [e.g., Anopheles (Harbach and Kitching, 2016), Drosophila (Bächli, 2016)] to scarcely studied (e.g., Xysticus, Clubiona). They further differ in the number of species, number of sequences per species, geographic ranges, and nucleotide divergences.…”

A human genotyping trial to estimate the post-feeding time from mosquito blood meals

“…Up to about 3,600 species in 37 genera are found worldwide [1], mainly in temperate and tropical regions. Some are vectors for diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and chikungunya, and thus cause many deaths each year.…”

The APL1 immune factor is encoded by a single ancestral gene in mostAnophelesspecies and expanded to three paralogs with distinct function in theAnopheles gambiaecomplex

“…Based on synteny, and the presence in A. epiroticus of a homolog of the gene AGAP007034 (located between A. gambiae APL1B and APL1C), the single APL1 gene in A. epiroticus displays the greatest relatedness to A. gambiae APL1C, with APL1B and APL1A presumably arising through duplication events during divergence of the Gambiae complex and A. christyi from their common ancestor. The Anopheles species carrying an expanded APL1 gene complement do not correspond precisely to the monophyletic Pyretophorus taxonomic group of Anopheles species (37, 38). The Pyretophorus group includes A. christyi and the Gambiae complex, which carry an expanded APL1 locus, and also A. epiroticus , which has only one APL1 gene.…”