Short Communication |
Corresponding author: Vladimir A. Lukhtanov ( lukhtanov@mail.ru ) Academic editor: Valentina G. Kuznetsova
© 2016 Vladimir A. Lukhtanov, Elena A. Pazhenkova, Asya V. Novikova.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Lukhtanov VA, Pazhenkova EA, Novikova AV (2016) Mitochondrial chromosome as a marker of animal migratory routes: DNA barcoding revealed Asian (non-African) origin of a tropical migrant butterfly Junonia orithya in south Israel. Comparative Cytogenetics 10(4): 671-677. https://doi.org/10.3897/CompCytogen.v10i4.11085
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The blue pansy Junonia orithya Linnaeus, 1758 (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae) is widely distributed along the tropical areas of Africa, Asia and Australia. It is also known as a migrant species in the Levant. Here we record J. orithya in south Israel and provide a DNA-barcode-based evidence for its Asian (non-African) origin.
barcode libraries, COI , Iran, Jordan, migration, Nymphalidae
Despite its small size, the mitochondrial chromosome is a functionally important portion of the eukaryotic DNA (
Here we demonstrate how DNA barcode libraries result in an opportunity to study migration routes. Migration is a common phenomenon in animals (
The blue pansy Junonia orithya Linnaeus, 1758 belongs to a group of butterflies able to perform long-range migrations (
On April 28, 2016 we collected a male of J. orithya in the southern tip of Israel in a small cultivated green patch near kibbutz Neot Smadar (30°02'40"N, 35°01'01"E, 409 m above sea level), enclosed by the Negev desert. Israel forms a biogeographic land bridge between Asia, Africa and Europe (
The “African” hypothesis seems to be plausible because animals and plants of African origin comprise a large group in the ecosystems of Israel, especially in the south where African elements are predominant (
Here we tested the Asian versus African hypotheses by analyzing the barcode COI region of the mitochondrial genome. First we inspected all COI barcodes available from GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/) and BOLD (http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeIndexNumber_Home) and revealed that J. orithya comprised two genetically differentiated clusters of individuals. One cluster was represented by butterflies from Africa (Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe), and another cluster was represented by butterflies from Asia and Australia. Despite huge territory occupied by each of these clusters and despite the substantial divergence between the clusters, each group was found to be very homogenous with respect to the COI gene.
Then we obtained DNA barcodes for the sample from Neot Smadar, Israel (BPALB098-16, GenBank accession number: KY118822) and in three additional samples from Iran (from the collection of the Zoological Institute, St. Petersburg: BPAL2941-15 KY118824, BPAL2942-15 KY118825, BPAL2943-15 KY118823). These samples were processed as previously described (
The analysis revealed that the collected sample from south Israel was identical with eight samples from South Asia: with three samples from Malaysia (KF226505.1, KF226504.1, KF226503.1) and with five samples from Pakistan (GU681856.1, HQ990373.1, HQ990374.1, HQ990375.1, KC755868.1) (p-distance = 0%). It was also very close to other samples from Oriental and Australian regions as well as to the samples from Iran (Fig.
Thus, the genetic connectivity identified in our study supports the hypothesis that J. orithya may colonize Israel and Iran from tropical regions in Asia. Given that the species seem not to overwinter in the north of the Middle East, its sporadic presence suggests that these are immigrants, but precise origins of the specimens studied here could not be traced because of lack of phylogeographic structure within the analysed Asian populations. Since the species is common in certain areas in Arabia (
We thank Gerard Talavera for critical comments. The financial support for this study was provided by the grant N 14-14-00541 from the Russian Science Foundation to the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.