Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 17, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0123
Keywords
Lepidoptera; Lycaenidae; conservation; extinction; museomics; ancient DNA sequencing
Categories
Funding
- Negaunee Foundation
- Grainger Bioinformatics Center at the Field Museum of Natural History
- NIH [R35 GM131828]
- NSF [DEB 1541560, DEB 1900357]
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By using next-generation sequencing on a 93-year-old museum specimen, researchers were able to confirm that the Xerces blue butterfly was indeed a distinct species and was driven to extinction.
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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