Mitogenomic evidence for the monophyly of blackcurrant gall mite subfamily Cecidophyinae (Eriophyoidea, Eriophyidae).

Superfamily Eriophyoidea is a group of highly miniaturized and host-specific phytophagous acariform mites closely related to the soil-dwelling nematalycid mites. Limited number of reliable morphological characters, multiple homoplasies, and numerous cryptic species impede systematics of this group. Most recent multigene phylogenies of Eriophyoidea suffer from incomplete sampling, inclusion of erroneous sequences, and unreliable alignments resulting in biologically inconsistent results. In this study, we obtained five new mitogenomes of eriophyoids and reanalyzed the mitogenomic dataset by Zhang et al. (2024) in order to test their conclusion on the polyphyly of the subfamily Cecidophyinae. We found out that it was based on the wrong identification of the phyllocoptine sequence OQ615736 as a cecidophyine taxon. Our analysis showed that a group of seven mitogenomic sequences assigned to cecidophyine genera Cecidophyes, Cecidophyopsis, Coptophylla, Cosetacus, and Glyptacus form a monophyletic group, which was itself divided into two clades corresponding to previously recognized tribes Colomerini and Cecidophyini. However, no mitochondrial gene clusters unique to Cecidophyinae were found. Gene order variability in Cecidophyinae is low and concerns only positions of the control region and tRNA genes trnC and trnI. Analysis of nucleotide diversity showed that three mitochondrial protein coding genes (COX1, COX3 and CYTB) are promising molecular markers for future eriophyoid studies, whereas genes ATP8, NAD4L, NAD5, NAD6 are hypervariable and should be used with caution or even excluded (ATP8) from multigene phylogenetic analyses. Finally, we identified numerous sequences of Eriophyoidea in GenBank with incorrect taxonomic affinities, underscoring the urgent need for a comprehensive revision of all eriophyoid mite sequences deposited in public databases.