Diversification of the phytophagous lineages of true bugs (Insecta: Hemiptera: Heteroptera) shortly after that of the flowering plants.

More than 95% of phytophagous true bug (Hemiptera: Heteroptera) species belong to four superfamilies: Miroidea (Cimicomorpha), Pentatomoidea, Coreoidea, and Lygaeoidea (all Pentatomomorpha). These iconic groups of highly diverse, overwhelmingly phytophagous insects include several economically prominent agricultural and silvicultural pest species, though their evolutionary history has not yet been well resolved. In particular, superfamily- and family-level phylogenetic relationships of these four lineages have remained controversial, and the divergence times of some crucial nodes for phytophagous true bugs have hitherto been little known, which hampers a better understanding of the evolutionary processes and patterns of phytophagous insects. In the present study, we used 150 species and concatenated nuclear and mitochondrial protein-coding genes and rRNA genes to infer the phylogenetic relationships within the Terheteroptera (Cimicomorpha + Pentatomomorpha) and estimated their divergence times. Our results support the monophyly of Cimicomorpha, Pentatomomorpha, Miroidea, Pentatomoidea, Pyrrhocoroidea, Coreoidea, and Lygaeoidea. The phylogenetic relationships across phytophagous lineages are largely congruent at deep nodes across the analyses based on different datasets and tree-reconstructing methods with just a few exceptions. Estimated divergence times and ancestral state reconstructions for feeding habit indicate that phytophagous true bugs explosively radiated in the Early Cretaceous-shortly after the angiosperm radiation-with the subsequent diversification of the most speciose clades (Mirinae, Pentatomidae, Coreinae, and Rhyparochromidae) in the Late Cretaceous.

When did the ancestor of true bugs become stinky? Disentangling the phylogenomics of Hemiptera-Heteroptera.

The phylogeny of true bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera), one of the most diverse insect groups in terms of morphology and ecology, has been the focus of attention for decades with respect to several deep nodes between the suborders of Hemiptera and the infraorders of Heteroptera. Here, we assembled a phylogenomic data set of 53 taxa and 3102 orthologous genes to investigate the phylogeny of Hemiptera-Heteroptera, and both concatenation and coalescent methods were used. A binode-control approach for data filtering was introduced to reduce the incongruence between different genes, which can improve the performance of phylogenetic reconstruction. Both hypotheses (Coleorrhyncha + Heteroptera) and (Coleorrhyncha + Auchenorrhyncha) received support from various analyses, in which the former is more consistent with the morphological evidence. Based on a divergence time estimation performed on genes with a strong phylogenetic signal, the origin of true bugs was dated to 290-268 Ma in the Permian, the time in Earth's history with the highest concentration of atmospheric oxygen. During this time interval, at least 1007 apomorphic amino acids were retained in the common ancestor of the extant true bugs. These molecular apomorphies are located in 553 orthologous genes, which suggests the common ancestor of the extant true bugs may have experienced large-scale evolution at the genome level.