Molecular Phylogeny Revealing the Single Origin of -associated (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) in Asia, with Descriptions of Three New and One Newly Recorded Species from Taiwan.

Cecidomyiid genus contains four Lauraceae-associated species in Asia and 13 species associated with various plant families in Latin American. In this article, three new species, sp. nov., sp. nov. and sp. nov., and one newly recorded species, , are reported on plant species (Lauraceae) from Taiwan. Molecular phylogenetic analysis was conducted for the four -associated , together with Lin, Yang and Tokuda, Tokuda and Yukawa, three and two species. The Asian and the -associated were monophyletic on the Neighbor-joining, Maximum-likelihood, and Bayesian inference trees. In addition, -associated species had the closest sistership with , which are associated with the plant genus (Lauraceae). These results suggest that , and are members of genus , a finding that is not consistent with another recent morphology-based phylogenetic study. Among the -associated lineages, the leaf galler sp. nov. is a sister to the clade of stem gallers, suggesting that host organ shift from leaf to stem occurred prior to host shift. Additionally, the paraphyly of the Taiwanese stem galler with respect to Japanese suggests that the distributional range of be expanded from Taiwan to Japan.