Phylogenetic relationships of Hemiptera inferred from mitochondrial and nuclear genes

Abstract

Here, we reconstructed the Hemiptera phylogeny based on the expanded mitochondrial protein-coding genes and the nuclear 18S rRNA gene, separately. The differential rates of change across lineages may associate with long-branch attraction (LBA) effect and result in conflicting estimates of phylogeny from different types of data. To reduce the potential effects of systematic biases on inferences of topology, various data coding schemes, site removal method, and different algorithms were utilized in phylogenetic reconstruction. We show that the outgroups Phthiraptera, Thysanoptera, and the ingroup Sternorrhyncha share similar base composition, and exhibit “long branches” relative to other hemipterans. Thus, the long-branch attraction between these groups is suspected to cause the failure of recovering Hemiptera under the homogeneous model. In contrast, a monophyletic Hemiptera is supported when heterogeneous model is utilized in the analysis. Although higher level phylogenetic relationships within Hemiptera remain to be answered, consensus between analyses is beginning to converge on a stable phylogeny.

Keywords:

• Hemiptera
• mitochondrial genome
• phylogenetic analysis
• 18Sr RNA

Declaration of interest

This research is supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB127600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31372229), the Special Fund for Agroscientific Research in the Public Interest (Nos. 201103012, 201103022, and 201303024), the Special Fund for Scientific Research (No. 2012FY111100), the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing (No. 6144027), and the National Key Technology R & D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (2012BAD19B00).

Supplementary material available online Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 Supplementary Figures 1-6