Graduate Student American Museum of Natural History New York, New York
In the insect radiation, the twisted-wing parasites (Strepsiptera) are among the most obscure and enigmatic orders. As obligate endoparasites of seven other insect groups, strepsipterans possess a variety of complex life histories along with very unusual phenotypic and molecular features. Several studies on the mitochondrial genome and ribosomal genes of Strepsiptera have demonstrated odd rearrangements of structure and sequence in both. Additionally, this order’s phylogenetic position within Insecta has been highly disputed—a phenomenon termed “the Strepsiptera Problem”. Investigating the elements and structure of the whole strepsipteran genome allows us to 1) see if this order has unique and bizarre genetic modifications on a wider scale and 2) revisit the Strepsiptera Problem, by evaluating genomic patterns in the context of prior phylogenetic tests of the interordinal relationships of Strepsiptera. We present our whole genome of the species Xenos peckii (Strepsiptera: Xenidae), generated with the ONT MinION and Illumina NovaSeq6000, along with its inclusion in the intra and interordinal collinearity analyses we have conducted for a comparative study of Strepsiptera and its sister groups.
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