2,366 new mitochondrial genomes with preliminary identification and phylogeny of >5,500 putative species of beetles

Mitochondrial genomes are a powerful marker for phylogenetics and biodiversity studies, but remain to be sequenced for the great majority of invertebrate species. We provide a reference set of newly sequenced mitogenomes and corresponding high-resolution images for 2,366 morphospecies from an inventory of beetles in two tropical forest sites in Panama and Malaysia. These sequences were combined with publicly available mitogenomes and edited and re-annotated according to standardised criteria. The dataset of mitochondrial genomes representing 5,518 putative morphospecies of Coleoptera spanning 145 families and 9 outgroups, was used to generate a phylogenetic tree under binary RY coding and using a backbone constraint from nuclear genomes. The tree recovered deep relationships that closely matched previous coleopteran phylogenomic studies, and many lower-level relationships were also largely congruent with earlier lineage-specific works. Furthermore, the expanded taxon sampling provides preliminary insights into shallow-level relationships for several poorly studied lineages. This enhanced resource will serve as a foundation for a comprehensive Coleoptera tree-of-life and support taxonomy, ecology and conservation biology of poorly known tropical lineages.