A New Species of Eucnemidae (Coleoptera: Elateroidea) with Its Complete Mitogenome and Mitogenome-Based Phylogenetic...

We describe Microrhagus ziwulingensis Muona & Meng, sp. nov., from China. The genus Microrhagus Dejean, 1833, was previously represented in China by only two species. We sequenced and assembled the complete mitogenome of M. ziwulingensis (GenBank accession OK143440), which encoded 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 2 ribosomal RNA genes (rRNAs), 22 transfer RNA genes (tRNAs), and a putative control region with a total length of 15,843 bp. Overall, 36 species of Elateroidea were collected as the ingroup (for six of these species, two sequences of the same species submitted by different submitters were used). Eight species of Buprestoidea served as the outgroup. We constructed phylogenetic trees using maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference (BI) methods based on 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs) from mitochondrial genomes. The phylogenetic trees showed that all families within the superfamily Elateroidea, which was used as the ingroup, formed monophyletic groups. The topology differed from previous studies, showing that Rhagophthalmidae and Lampyridae formed a sister clade, and that Phengodidae + Lycidae, with Cantharidae, formed a sister clade. These discrepancies should be attributed to the use of a single type of molecular marker and the intense shortage of available sampling. This also indicates that mitochondrial genomic research on Eucnemidae, and even on the superfamily Elateroidea, still needs further expansion.