Phylogenomic and mitogenomic data can accelerate inventorying of tropical beetles during the current biodiversity crisis
- Czech Advanced Technology Research Institute, Czech Republic
Abstract
Conservation efforts must be evidence-based, so rapid and economically feasible methods should be used to quantify diversity and distribution patterns. We have attempted to overcome current impediments to the gathering of biodiversity data by using integrative phylogenomic and three mtDNA fragment analyses. As a model, we sequenced the Metriorrhynchini beetle fauna, sampled from ~700 localities in three continents. The species-rich dataset included ~6,500 terminals, ~1,850 putative species delimited at 5% uncorrected pairwise threshold, possibly ~1,000 of them unknown to science. Neither type of data could alone answer our questions on biodiversity and phylogeny. The phylogenomic backbone enabled the integrative delimitation of robustly defined natural genus-group units that will inform future research. Using constrained mtDNA analysis, we identified the spatial structure of species diversity, very high species-level endemism, and a biodiversity hotspot in New Guinea. We suggest that focused field research and subsequent laboratory and bioinformatic workflow steps would substantially accelerate the inventorying of any hyperdiverse tropical group with several thousand species. The outcome would be a scaffold for the incorporation of further data from environmental sequencing and ecological studies. The database of sequences could set a benchmark for the spatiotemporal evaluation of biodiversity, would support evidence-based conservation planning, and would provide a robust framework for systematic, biogeographic, and evolutionary studies.
Data availability
All datasets are deposited in the Mendeley Data repository DOI: 10.17632/ntgg6k4fjx.1.
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Author details
Funding
Grantova agentura Ceske republiky (18-14942S)
- Ladislav Bocak
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Motyka et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Phylogenomic and mitogenomic data can accelerate inventorying of tropical beetles during the current biodiversity crisis
eLife 10:e71895.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71895
