Characteristics of the complete mitochondrial genome of Suhpalacsa longialata (Neuroptera, Ascalaphidae) and its phylogenetic implications

Xin-Yan Gao; Yin-Yin Cai; Dan-Na Yu; Kenneth B Storey; Jia-Yong Zhang

doi:10.7717/peerj.5914

Characteristics of the complete mitochondrial genome of Suhpalacsa longialata (Neuroptera, Ascalaphidae) and its phylogenetic implications

PeerJ. 2018 Nov 14:6:e5914. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5914. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Xin-Yan Gao^#¹, Yin-Yin Cai^#¹, Dan-Na Yu^{1

2}, Kenneth B Storey³, Jia-Yong Zhang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ College of Chemistry and Life Science, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang, China.
² Key Lab of Wildlife Biotechnology, Conservation and Utilization of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang, China.
³ Department of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The owlflies (Family Ascalaphidae) belong to the Neuroptera but are often mistaken as dragonflies because of morphological characters. To date, only three mitochondrial genomes of Ascalaphidae, namely Libelloides macaronius; Ascaloptynx appendiculatus; Ascalohybris subjacens, are published in GenBank, meaning that they are greatly under-represented in comparison with the 430 described species reported in this family. In this study, we sequenced and described the complete mitochondrial genome of Suhpalacsa longialata (Neuroptera, Ascalaphidae). The total length of the S. longialata mitogenome was 15,911 bp, which is the longest known to date among the available family members of Ascalaphidae. However, the size of each gene was similar to the other three Ascalaphidae species. The S. longialata mitogenome included a transposition of tRNA^Cys and tRNA^Trp genes and formed an unusual gene arrangement tRNA^Cys-tRNA^Trp-tRNA^Tyr (CWY). It is likely that the transposition occurred by a duplication of both genes followed by random loss of partial duplicated genes. The nucleotide composition of the S. longialata mitogenome was as follows: A = 41.0%, T = 33.8%, C = 15.5%, G = 9.7%. Both Bayesian inference and ML analyses strongly supported S. longialata as a sister clade to (Ascalohybris subjacens + L. macaronius), and indicated that Ascalaphidae is not monophyletic.

Keywords: Ascalaphidae; Mitochondrial genome; Neuroptera; Phylogenetic relationship.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the Zhejiang provincial Natural Science Foundation (Y18C040006) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31370042). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.