Complete mitochondrial genome of Plodia interpunctella (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae).

The Plodia interpunctella belongs to Pyralidae in Lepidoptera. The complete mitogenome of P. interpunctella was described in this study, which is typically circular duplex molecules and 15,403 bp in length, containing the standard metazoan set of 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, and an A + T-rich region. The gene order is the same as other lepidopterans. Except for cox1 started with CGA, all other PCGs started with the standard ATN codons. Most of the PCGs terminated with the stop codon TAA, whereas nad1 has the stop codon TAG, nad4 has the incomplete stop codon T. The phylogenetic tree showed that P. interpunctella and Corcyra cephalonica are clustered into a clade Pyralidae.

Plodia interpunctella (Lepidoptera, Pyralidae) is a major pest of stored grain. If prevention and control are not timely, it will bring serious losses to agricultural production (Mbata and Osuji 1983). Since it is easy to get, like other insects, for example, Drosophila melanogaster, has been used as an experimental model insect. Many functional genes have been characterized (Zhu et al. 2000; Liu et al. 2015).

In this paper, the samples were collected by light trapping in Taiyuan city of China (37.833393, 112.666114) in July 2019, some of these specimens were immediately frozen at −80 °C on board for mitogenome analysis and others were preserved by spreading wings in the Herbarium of Institute of Plant Protection, Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and their numbers is 20190605–20190610. Total genomic DNA was extracted from the tail tip using the Ezup pillar genomic DNA extraction kit (Sangon Biotech, Shanghai, China). The mitogenome was sequenced by Illumina Hiseq 4000. Gene annotation was performed and circularity was checked using the MITOS2 webserver (Bernt et al. 2013, http://mitos.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/).

The mitochondrial genome of P. interpunctella has a total length of 15,403 bp (GenBank accession No. MN619781), consisting of 13 PCGs, 22 tRNA, 2 rRNA genes, and an A + T-rich region. As with other insect mitogenomes(Wu et al. 2016; Li et al. 2019), the major strand encodes a larger number of genes (9 PCGs and 14 tRNAs) than the minor strand (4 PCGs, 8 tRNAs, and 2 rRNA genes). Two rRNAs (16S rRNA and 12S rRNA) are located between tRNA-Leu(CUN) and tRNA-Val, and between tRNA-Val and the A + T-rich region, respectively. The 16S rRNA is 1332 bp in length and the 12S rRNA is 782 bp in length. The A + T-rich region is 320 bp long and located between 12S rRNA and tRNA-Met. The mitogenome contains 42.09% T, 38.19% A, 12.18% C, and 7.54% G, besides a high A + T content. All of the protein-coding genes have ATN as the start codon except for cox1, which starts with CGA. Eleven PCGs have the common stop codon TAA, nad1 has the stop codon TAG, nad4 has the incomplete stop codon T.

The phylogenetic position of P. interpunctella was inferred using sequences of the 13 PCGs of 21 species represented 20 families, besides a species Anopheles gambiae from Diptera (which was used as outgroup) (Figure 1). The sequences were aligned with MAFFT v7.2 software (Katoh and Standley 2013) and the evolutionary analyses were conducted with RAxML v8.2.10 (Stamatakis 2014) on the CIPRES Science Gateway (Miller et al. 2010). The GTRGAMMA model with ‘Let RAxML halt bootstrapping automatically’ was used. The phylogenetic tree was visualized using FigTree v1.4.4 (http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/). The result showed that P. interpunctella and Corcyra cephalonica are clustered into a clade Pyralidae.

Figure 1.

Maximum-likelihood tree of evolutionary relationships P. interpunctella based on the complete mitogenomes of 20 Lepidopteran moths.

Nucleotide sequence accession number

The complete mitochondrial genome sequence of P. interpunctella was deposited in GenBank under the accession number MN619781.