Structural alignment of 18S and 28S rDNA sequences provides insights into phylogeny of Phytophaga (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea and Chrysomeloidea)

By A. Marvaldi, C. Duckett, K. Kjer, Joseph J Gillespie. 2009

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We performed a comparative study of partial rDNA sequences from a variety of Coleoptera taxa to construct an annotated alignment based on secondary structure information, which in turn, provides improved rRNA structure models useful for phylogenetic reconstruction. Subsequent phylogenetic analysis was performed to test monophyly and interfamilial relationships of the megadiverse plant feeding beetle group known as ‘Phytophaga’ (Curculionoidea and Chrysomeloidea), as well as to discover their closest relatives among the Cucujiformia. Parsimony and Bayesian analyses were performed based on the structural alignment of segments of 18S rRNA (variable regions V4‐V5, V7‐V9) and 28S rRNA (expansion segment D2). A total of 104 terminal taxa of Coleoptera were included: 96 species of Cucujiformia beetles, representing the families and most ‘subfamilies’ of weevils and chrysomeloids (Phytophaga), as well as several families of Cleroidea, Tenebrionoidea and Cucujoidea, and eight outgroups from three other polyphagan series: Scarabaeiformia, Elateriformia and Bostrichiformia. The results from the different methods of analysis agree — recovering the monophyly of the ‘Phytophaga’, including Curculionoidea and Chrysomeloidea as sister groups. The curculionoid and chrysomeloid phylogeny recovered from the aligned 18S and 28S rDNA segments, which is independent of morphological data, is in agreement with recent hypotheses or concepts based on morphological evidence, particularly with respect to familial relationships. Our results provide clues about the evolutionary origin of the phytophagan beetles within the megaclade Cucujiformia, suggesting that the sister group of ‘Curculionoidea + Chrysomeloidea’ is a clade of the ‘Cucujoidea’, represented in this study by species in Boganiidae, Erotylidae, Nitidulidae, Cucujidae and Silvanidae. The Coccinellidae and Endomychidae are not grouped with the latter, and the remaining terminal taxa are nested in Tenebrionoidea and Cleroidea. We propose that the combination of structurally aligned ribosomal RNA gene regions 18S (V4‐V5, V7‐V9) and 28S (D2) are useful in testing monophyly and resolving relationships among beetle superfamilies and families.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7e45cfb128145a995ea863272095049cb52c62f

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In Ecology

1. Michael Whiting
2. H. Jourdan
3. Alan R. Lemmon
4. K. Miller
5. A. Vogler
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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8. J. Lawrence

Citations in the corpus

• Building the Coleoptera tree‐of‐life for >8000 species: composition of public DNA data and fit with Linnaean classification (2014, background): “The current results support the polyphyly of Cucujoidea (Hunt et al., 2007; Marvaldi et al., 2009).”
• Higher‐level phylogeny of longhorn beetles (Coleoptera: Chrysomeloidea) inferred from mitochondrial genomes (2020, background): “…molecular phylogenetic studies (Farrell, 1998; Duckett et al., 2004; Farrell & Sequeira, 2004; Gómez-Zurita et al., 2007, 2008; Hunt et al., 2007; Marvaldi et al., 2009; Bocak et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2014; McKenna et al., 2015), but the exact relationships with the other three clades of…”
• Anchored hybrid enrichment provides new insights into the phylogeny and evolution of longhorned beetles (Cerambycidae) (2018, background): “…two subfamilies have previously been recovered as sister groups in some trees resulting from molecular or combined phylogenetic analyses with limited sampling (Farrell, 1998; Farrell & Sequeira, 2004; Gómez-Zurita et al., 2007, 2008; Marvaldi et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2013; McKenna et al., 2015).”
• Higher level molecular phylogeny of darkling beetles (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) (2014, result): “Whereas Cleroidea was found to be paraphyletic under MP, both BI and ML methods recovered the monophyly of the superfamily, corroborating the results of several recent molecular studies (Hunt et al., 2007; Marvaldi et al., 2009; Bocák et al., 2014).”
• The beetle tree of life reveals that Coleoptera survived end‐Permian mass extinction to diversify during the Cretaceous terrestrial revolution (2015, background): “Other molecular phylogenetic studies also recover the polyphyly of Cucujoidea, for example Hunt et al. (2007), Marvaldi et al. (2009), Robertson (2010) and Robertson et al. (2015).”
• Phylogeny and classification of Cucujoidea and the recognition of a new superfamily Coccinelloidea (Coleoptera: Cucujiformia) (2015, background): “Consistent with previous studies (e.g. Farrell, 1998; Marvaldi et al., 2009; McKenna et al., 2009) the phytophagan superfamilies Chrysomeloidea (60) and Curculionoidea (60) were recovered with only weak to moderate support in the present study (Fig.”