Huang, G.-H. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2024

Environmental DNA from ethanol eluent of flowers reveals a widespread diversity in cowpea associated animal communities in Hainan Island

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.), as an economical crop, is one of the important pillar industries of rural revitalization strategy in China. However, cowpea planting in China is often infested and damaged by many insects during growth, especially in Hainan region with a warm and wet tropical climate. Traditional monitoring methods with technical limitation could only detect a few common significant agricultural pests, how many kinds of species associated with cowpea is unknown. Here, we employed environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to characterize cowpea associated animal community-level diversity among six planting areas in Hainan. In all, 62 species were detected, of which 99.05% was Arthropoda, suggesting that Arthropods are the main groups interacting with cowpea. Moreover, we also detected 28 pests on cowpea, predominantly belonging to Thysanoptera, Lepidoptera, Diptera and Hemiptera, of which 20 pests were first reported and need more extra attention. Furthermore, clustering results indicated that there is a certain diversity of cowpea associated animals in different regions of Hainan, but the species composition was similar in the large planting areas due to the indiscriminate use of pesticides, which need further develop scientific pesticide applications to ensure adequate species diversity. This study represents the first molecular approach to investigate the cowpea associated animal communities and provides basic information for further scientific pesticide applications.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Phylogenomics reveals the relationships of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera): providing the potential landscape using universal single copy orthologues

BackgroundA robust and stable phylogenetic framework is a fundamental goal of evolutionary biology. As the third largest insect order following by Diptera and Coleoptera in the world, lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) play a central role in almost every terrestrial ecosystem as the indicators of environmental change and serve as important models for biologists exploring questions related to ecology and evolutionary biology. However, for such charismatic insect group, the higher-level phylogenetic relationships among its superfamilies are still poorly unresolved. Resultswe increased taxon sampling among Lepidoptera (40 superfamilies and 76 families contained 286 taxa) and filtered the unqualified samples, then acquired a series of large amino-acid datasets from 69,680 to 400,330 for phylogenomic reconstructions. Using these datasets, we explored the effect of different taxon sampling on tree topology by considering a series of systematic errors using ML and BI methods. Moreover, we also tested the effectiveness in topology robustness among the three ML-based models. The results showed that taxon sampling is an important determinant in tree robustness of accurate lepidopteran phylogenetic estimation. Long-branch attraction (LBA) caused by site-wise heterogeneity is a significant source of bias given rise to topologies divergence of ditrysia in phylogenomic reconstruction. Phylogenetic inference showed a most comprehensive framework by far to reveal the relationships among lepidopteran superfamilies, but limited by taxon sampling, it could only represent the current understanding of the lepidopteran tree of life. The relationships within the species-rich and relatively rapid radiation Ditrysia and especially Apoditrysia remain poorly unresolved, which need to increase taxon sampling and adopt lineage-specific genes for further phylogenomic reconstruction. ConclusionsThe present study further expands the taxon sampling of lepidopteran phylogeny and provides a potential phylogenomic foundation for further understanding its current higher-level relationships.

evolutionary biology↗