Chronological Incongruences between Mitochondrial and Nuclear Phylogenies of <i>Aedes</i> Mosquitoes

• Main Authors: Nicola Zadra, Annapaola Rizzoli, Omar Rota-Stabelli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
• Series: Life
• Subjects: divergence; mtDNA; Diptera; phylogeny; saturation; rates
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/3/181

One-third of all mosquitoes belong to the Aedini, a tribe comprising common vectors of viral zoonoses such as <i>Aedes aegypti</i> and <i>Aedes albopictus</i>. To improve our understanding of their evolution, we present an updated multigene estimate of Aedini phylogeny and divergence, focusing on the disentanglement between nuclear and mitochondrial phylogenetic signals. We first show that there are some phylogenetic discrepancies between nuclear and mitochondrial markers which may be caused by wrong taxa assignment in samples collections or by some stochastic effect due to small gene samples. We indeed show that the concatenated dataset is model and framework dependent, indicating a general paucity of signal. Our Bayesian calibrated divergence estimates point toward a mosquito radiation in the mid-Jurassic and an <i>Aedes</i> radiation from the mid-Cretaceous on. We observe, however a strong chronological incongruence between mitochondrial and nuclear data, the latter providing divergence times within the Aedini significantly younger than the former. We show that this incongruence is consistent over different datasets and taxon sampling and that may be explained by either peculiar evolutionary event such as different levels of saturation in certain lineages or a past history of hybridization throughout the genus. Overall, our updated picture of Aedini phylogeny, reveal a strong nuclear-mitochondrial incongruence which may be of help in setting the research agenda for future phylogenomic studies of Aedini mosquitoes.