Museum genomics reveals the Xerces blue butterfly (Glaucopsyche xerces) was a distinct species driven to extinction |
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| Authors: | Felix Grewe Marcus R. Kronforst Naomi E. Pierce Corrie S. Moreau |
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| Affiliation: | 1.Grainger Bioinformatics Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL 60605, USA;2.Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA;3.Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;4.Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA;5.Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA |
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| Abstract: | The last Xerces blue butterfly was seen in the early 1940s, and its extinction is credited to human urban development. This butterfly has become a North American icon for insect conservation, but some have questioned whether it was truly a distinct species, or simply an isolated population of another living species. To address this question, we leveraged next-generation sequencing using a 93-year-old museum specimen. We applied a genome skimming strategy that aimed for the organellar genome and high-copy fractions of the nuclear genome by a shallow sequencing approach. From these data, we were able to recover over 200 million nucleotides, which assembled into several phylogenetically informative markers and the near-complete mitochondrial genome. From our phylogenetic analyses and haplotype network analysis we conclude that the Xerces blue butterfly was a distinct species driven to extinction. |
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| Keywords: | Lepidoptera Lycaenidae conservation extinction museomics ancient DNA sequencing |
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