The systematics and phylogeny of flatfish is investigated on the complete sequence of nucleotides at subunit 1 cytochrome c oxidase (Co-1) and cytochrome b (Cyt-b) genes. In total 17 species from our collection and some species from GenBank were analyzed. Four types of trees were built: Bayesian (BA), maximum likelihood (ML), maximum parsimony (MP), and neighbor joining (NJ). These trees showed similar topology. Two separate clusters on the trees support subfamily Hippoglossoidinae and Hippoglossinae subdivision and monophyletic status of these taxa. The subfamily Pleuronectinae also can be considered monophyletic, if the tribe Microstomini is excluded from it and genus Lepidopsetta is moved into the tribe Pleuronectini. Mitogenomes represented by 25 complete sequences from NCBI GenBank were analyzed. After alignment two sets of nucleotide sequences were formed and investigated independently. One set included 13 structural genes (14,886 bp), the second set comprised by the mtDNA without ND6 gene (10,457 bp). Both data sets give congruent phylogenetic signal that agreed with conventional views on the taxonomy of the order Pleuronectiformes; however, the first set gives better topology. In BA gene tree there are two well supported nodes which include the representatives of suborders Pleuronectoidei and Psettoidei. Within Pleuronectoidei two superfamilies, Pleuronectoidea and Soleidea are highly supported in BA but in all four kinds of gene trees (BA, ML, MP and NJ) the only superfamily Pleuronectoidea is well supported. At the top of hierarchy, all flatfishes belonging to the order Pleuronectiformes forming also a monophyletic clade in our data, with support level of 100% but in BA tree only. The monophyly of the family Pleuronectidae is well supported both by single gene data and by complete mtDNA sequences.
Keywords: Co-1; Cyt-b; evolution; flatfish; molecular phylogenetics; molecular phylogeny; p-distance; taxonomy.