Phylogeny of Coreoidea based on mitochondrial genomes show the paraphyly of Coreidae and Alydidae.

Abstract

Coreoidea (Insecta: Hemiptera: Heteroptera) is a widely distributed and agriculturally important bugs. However, the phylogeny of Coreoidea lacked consensus on higher-level relationships and several studies by comparative morphological characters and molecular data suggested the non-monophyly of two families: Coreidae and Alydidae. The mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) has long been thought to be a significant marker to understand phylogenetic relationships, but the mitogenome in Alydidae is scarce to date. In the present study, we gathered the mitogenomes of 28 species from four families of Coreoidea excluding Hyocephalidae (Alydidae, Coreidae, Rhopalidae, and Stenocephalidae), including four newly sequenced mitogenomes of Alydidae, and conducted mitogenomic organization and phylogenetic studies. We used maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference methods to infer the higher-level phylogeny from the perspective of mitogenomes, primarily to investigate the phylogenetic relationship betweeen Coreidae and Alydidae. We add evidence that neither Alydidae nor Coreidae are monophyletic based on mitogenomes. Newly sequenced mitogenomes of Alydidae have traditional gene structure and gene rearrangement was not found. Alydinae was always recovered as closely related to Pseudophloeinae of the coreid subfamily with high support. The placement of the coreid subfamily Hydarinae and alydid subfamily Micrelytrinae are unstable depending on approach used. In terms of the length and nucleotide composition of the protein coding genes in mitogenomes, Pseudophloeinae and Hydarinae of coreid were more similar to Alydidae. The unsettled classification issues of Coreidae and Alydidae by mitogenomes were demonstrated in this work, indicating that further study is needed.