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A phylogeny of sand flies ( D iptera: P sychodidae: P hlebotominae), using recent E thiopian collections and a broad selection of publicly available DNA sequence data
Author(s) -
GRACELEMA DANIELLE M.,
YARED SOLOMON,
QUITADAMO ANDREW,
JANIES DANIEL A.,
WHEELER WARD C.,
BALKEW MESHESHA,
HAILU ASRAT,
WARBURG ALON,
CLOUSE RONALD M.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
systematic entomology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.552
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1365-3113
pISSN - 0307-6970
DOI - 10.1111/syen.12135
Subject(s) - biology , clade , subfamily , phylogenetics , monophyly , taxon , evolutionary biology , genus , zoology , genetics , gene , ecology
Sand flies in the psychodid subfamily P hlebotominae carry important human pathogens in the trypanosomatid protozoan genus Leishmania ( C upolillo). Despite the fact that hundreds of sequences for this group are now publicly available, they constitute different sets of taxa and genetic markers. Integrating these data to construct a molecular phylogeny of the family is a significant bioinformatics challenge. We used sequences of eight markers obtained from freshly collected sand flies from E thiopia and combined them with over 1300 publicly available sequences, performing a combined analysis after generating single terminal sequences from ancestral reconstructions for some individual markers. The resulting phylogeny had 113 terminals and recovered P hlebotominae and certain species groups as monopheletic. Although the 20 outgroups in P sychodinae were recovered as a well‐resolved clade with bootstrap support for many internal clades, P hlebotominae was recovered as several lineages with unclear relationships among them. However, phlebotomines clustered by geographic region, the most notable being all the N ew W orld species except Brumptomyia ( G alati), which were recovered as monophyletic. Our phylogeny suggests a S ub‐ S aharan A frican or S outh A sian origin for the subfamily, which subsequently expanded to the north and west, and eventually to the N ew W orld. Supported species groups are often composed of widespread species with overlapping ranges. This result highlights the need for a large increase in the amount and diversity of molecular sequence data, and a broad selection of terminals, to test taxonomic hypotheses and examine speciation processes in this important group of flies.