Abstract
The Culicidae family is distributed worldwide and comprises about 3587 species subdivided into the subfamilies Anophelinae and Culicinae. This is the first description of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from Aedes fluviatilis, Aedeomyia squamipennis, Coquillettidia nigricans, Psorophora albipes, and Psorophora ferox. The mitogenomes showed an average length of 15,046 pb and 78.02% AT content, comprising 37 functional subunits (13 protein coding genes, 22 tRNAs, and two rRNAs). The most common start codons were ATT/ATG, and TAA was the stop codon for all PCGs. The tRNAs had the typical leaf clover structure, except tRNASer1. Phylogeny was inferred by analyzing the 13 PCGs concatenated nucleotide sequences of 48 mitogenomes. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference analysis placed Ps. albipes and Ps. ferox in the Janthinosoma group, like the accepted classification of Psorophora genus. Ae. fluviatilis was placed in the Aedini tribe, but was revealed to be more related to the Haemagogus genus, a result that may have been hampered by the poor sampling of Aedes sequences. Cq. nigricans clustered with Cq. chrysonotum, both related to Mansonia. Ae. squamipennis was placed as the most external lineage of the Culicinae subfamily. The yielded topology supports the concept of monophyly of all groups and ratifies the current taxonomic classification.
Highlights
The Family Culicidae (Meigen, 1818), known as mosquitoes, is a large taxon distributed worldwide
Despite the great number of Culicidae of medical importance, in the context of the Brazilian Amazon region, there is in contrast no availability of genomic information in public data repositories of these organisms with few exceptions, and considering the great potential of the applicability of molecular markers such as the mitochondrial genome in the development of investigations of mosquito molecular taxonomy, we present in this study, for the first time, the characterization of the mitogenome of the species
The size of the sequences obtained ranged from 14,789 bp (Cq. nigricans) to 15,307 bp (Ps. ferox), and the overall AT content ranged from 77.5% (Ae fluviatilis) to 78.9% (Cq. nigricans)
Summary
The Family Culicidae (Meigen, 1818), known as mosquitoes, is a large taxon distributed worldwide. The Culicidae comprises about 3587 officially recognized species, classified in the subfamilies Anophelinae and Culicinae, accepted to be monophyletic despite some inner relations that are not entirely understood [1]. This family of insects is responsible for transmitting the etiologic agents of several arboviruses such as dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Chikungunya virus, and Zika virus, filariosis from Wuchereria bancrofti and malaria, caused by Plasmodium spp. The unknown medical/veterinary importance of Bironella and Chagasia makes most of the studies focus towards the genus Anopheles due its capacity to transmit malaria parasites, in addition to several arboviruses [7,8]. The monophyletic status for Bironella is not supported in most of the studies [6,9], but the opposite is found to the genus Anopheles, the subgenus Stethomyia, Lophopodomyia, Kerteszia and Cellia [9]
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