Phylogenetic relationships of three representative sea krait species (genus Laticauda; elapidae; serpentes) based on 13 mitochondrial genes

Abstract

To investigate the phylogenetic relationships of the genus Laticauda to related higher taxa, we compared the sequences of four mitochondrial genes (12S rRNA, 16S rRNA, ND4, Cytb) from three Laticauda species (L. colubrina, L. laticaudata, and L. semifasciata) with those of 55 Asian and Australo-Melanesian elapid species. We also characterized the complete mitogenomes of the three Laticauda species and compared the sequences of 13 mitochondrial genes from Laticauda species with five terrestrial elapid and one viperid species to estimate phylogenetic relationships and divergence times. Our results showed that the genus Laticauda is paraphyletic to terrestrial elapids and diverged from the Asian elapids approximately 16.23 Mya. The mitogenomes of the three Laticauda species commonly encoded 13 proteins, 22 tRNAs, 12S and 16S rRNAs and two control regions and ranged from 17,170 and 17,450 bp in size. The L. colubrina mitogenome was more similar to that of L. laticaudata than that of L. semifasciata. The divergence time among the three Laticauda clades was estimated at 8–10 Mya, and a close phylogenetic relationship between L. colubrina and L. laticaudata was found. Our results contribute to our understanding of the evolutionary history of sea kraits.

Keywords:

• Sea snakes
• Laticauda
• Bayesian inference
• mitochondrial genome
• divergence time

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Ming-Chung Tu for his help in collecting specimens in Taiwan, the fishermen who donated valuable sea krait samples in Korea and Kyo-Soung Koo, Woo-Jin Choi, Jong-Sun Kim, Il-Kook Park, and Sera Kwon for their assistance during field surveys.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea [2014R1A1A4A01005302].