Second-generation sequencing of entire mitochondrial coding-regions (~15.4kb) holds promise for study of the phylogeny and taxonomy of human body lice and head lice

Abstract

The Illumina Hiseq platform was used to sequence the entire mitochondrial coding-regions of 20 body lice, Pediculus humanus Linnaeus, and head lice, P. capitis De Geer (Phthiraptera: Pediculidae), from eight towns and cities in five countries: Ethiopia, France, China, Australia and the U.S.A. These data (~310kb) were used to see how much more informative entire mitochondrial coding-region sequences were than partial mitochondrial coding-region sequences, and thus to guide the design of future studies of the phylogeny, origin, evolution and taxonomy of body lice and head lice. Phylogenies were compared from entire coding-region sequences (~15.4kb), entire cox1 (~1.5kb), partial cox1 (~700bp) and partial cytb (~600bp) sequences. On the one hand, phylogenies from entire mitochondrial coding-region sequences (~15.4kb) were much more informative than phylogenies from entire cox1 sequences (~1.5kb) and partial gene sequences (~600 to ~700bp). For example, 19 branches had >95% bootstrap support in our maximum likelihood tree from the entire mitochondrial coding-regions (~15.4kb) whereas the tree from 700bp cox1 had only two branches with bootstrap support >95%. Yet, by contrast, partial cytb (~600bp) and partial cox1 (~486bp) sequences were sufficient to genotype lice to Clade A, B or C. The sequences of the mitochondrial genomes of the P. humanus, P. capitis and P. schaeffi Fahrenholz studied are in NCBI GenBank under the accession numbers KC660761-800, KC685631-6330, KC241882-97, EU219988-95, HM241895-8 and JX080388-407. © 2014 The Royal Entomological Society.