The complete mitochondrial genome sequence of Cletus punctiger (Heteroptera: Coreidae).

Cletus punctiger is a famous economic crop pest in China, especially for rice. Here, we first reported the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of this pest. The mitochondrial genome is 16,166 bp in length, including 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes, and 1 control region (D-Loop). The maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree confirmed that C. punctiger belonged to the Coreidae subfamily.

Cletus punctiger is an important pest of rice, which often sucks the juice of young panicle, causing a decline in rice yield. This pest mainly appears from mid-July to early August and widely distributed throughout China, especially in the south of the Yangtze River. To get a deeper understanding of the phylogenetic relationship of this pest, we sequenced and reported its complete mitochondrial genome.

The specimen was collected from Nanchang city, Jiangxi province (115.85°E, 28.68°N), China. The genomic DNA of C. punctiger was extracted using a Genomic DNA Extraction Kit (Shanghai, China), following the manufacturer’s instructions. The sample was stored at the Tianjin State Key Laboratory of Modern Chinese Medicine (voucher number: DCYC-1). Total DNA was sequenced using the Illumina Hiseq X Ten platform (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA). The complete mitogenome of C. punctiger was assembled using NOVOPlasty version 3.1 (Dierckxsens et al. 2017), and the Cloresmus pulchellus (Accession number: MF497719) was used as reference (Dierckxsens et al. 2017). The mitochondrial genome of C. punctiger was annotated using the MITOS web server (Bernt et al. 2013). Then, the annotated genome was inspected manually. The tRNA genes were confirmed using the tRNAscan-SE search server (Lowe and Eddy 1997).

The complete mitogenome of C. punctiger is 16,166 bp in length, consisting of 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes, and 1 control region. The composition of the mitogenome is 41.9% A, 15.9% C, 10.7% G, 31.5% T, and with 26.6% guanine-cytosine (GC) content. It is similar to other insect mitogenomes (Gao et al. 2019; Yu et al. 2019).

There are four genes (ND2, ATP6, COIII, and CytB) starting with ATG initiation codon, three PCGs with ATT codon (COII, ND3, and ND4L), two PCGs (ND5 and ND4) initiation codons are TAC, and the remaining genes ATP8, ND6, ND1, and COI are starting with ATC, ATA, TAA, and TTG codons, respectively. Correspondingly, 7 PCGs (ND2, ATP8, ATP6, COIII, ND3, ND4L, and ND6) share the stop codon TAA. CytB and ND1 are terminated with TAG and ATC, respectively. While COI and COII genes are terminated with an incomplete stop codon (T-). Two PCGs (ND5 and ND4) are terminated with an incomplete stop codon (A-). A maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree was constructed based on the complete mitochondrial genome from NCBI database (Figure 1), with Tachyta nana as an outgroup. The result indicated that C. punctiger formed an independent lineage in the Coreinae subfamily. Overall, the complete mitochondrial genome of C. punctiger can contribute to further phylogenetic study within Coreidae.

Figure 1.

Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree of Cletus punctiger constructed with 12 species. Numbers at nodes are values for bootstrap support.