Resolving phylogenetic relationships and taxonomic revision in the Pseudogastromyzon (Cypriniformes, Gastromyzonidae) genus: molecular and morphological evidence for a new genus, Labigastromyzon

Abstract

The Pseudogastromyzon genus, consisting of species predominantly distributed throughout southeastern China, has garnered increasing market attention in recent years due to its ornamental appeal. However, the overlapping diagnostic attributes render the commonly accepted criteria for interspecific identification unreliable, leaving the phylogenetic relationships among Pseudogastromyzon species unexplored. In the present study, we undertake molecular phylogenetic and morphological examinations of the Pseudogastromyzon genus. Our phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial genes distinctly segregated Pseudogastromyzon species into two clades: the Pseudogastromyzon clade and the Labigastromyzon clade. A subsequent morphological assessment revealed that the primary dermal ridge (specifically, the second ridge) within the labial adhesive apparatus serves as an effective and precise interspecific diagnostic characteristic. Moreover, the distributional ranges of Pseudogastromyzon and Labigastromyzon are markedly distinct, exhibiting only a narrow area of overlap. Considering the morphological heterogeneity of the labial adhesive apparatus and the substantial division within the molecular phylogeny, we advocate for the elevation of the Labigastromyzon subgenus to the status of a separate genus. Consequently, we have ascertained the validity of the Pseudogastromyzon and Labigastromyzon species, yielding a total of six valid species. To facilitate future research, we present comprehensive descriptions of the redefined species and introduce novel identification keys.

Keywords

Labigastromyzon / mitochondrial genome / phylogeny / Pseudogastromyzon / taxonomy

References

[1] BankevichA,NurkS, AntipovD et al. (2012). SPAdes: a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing. Journal of Computational Biology 19,455–477.

[2] BoulengerGA (1894). Descriptions of a new lizard and a new fish obtained in Formosa by Mr. Holst. Journal of Natural History 14,462–463.

[3] ChenYX,ChenYS, ShiCM et al. (2018). SOAPnuke: A MapReduce acceleration-supported software for integrated quality control and preprocessing of high-throughput sequencing data. GigaScience 7,gix120.

[4] ChenYY (1980). Systematic studies on the fishes of the family Homalopteridae of China II. Classification of the fishes of the subfamily Gastromyzoninae. Acta Hydrobiologica Sinica 7,95–120.

[5] ChenYY,TangWQ (2000). Homalopteridae. In: Le PQ et al., ed. Fauna Sinica, Osteichthyes, Cypriniformes III. Science Press,Beijing, pp. 503–519.

[6] DonathA,Jühling F,Al-ArabM et al. (2019). Improved annotation of protein-coding genes boundaries in metazoan mitochondrial genomes. Nucleic Acids Research 47,10543–10552.

[7] FangPW (1930). New and inadequately known Homalopterine Loaches of China. Contributions from the Biological Laboratory of the Science Society of China. (Zoological Series) 6,24–43.

[8] FangPW (1933). Notes on some Chinese Homalopterid loaches. Sinensia 4,39–50.

[9] FroeseR,PaulyD (2010). FishBase: Fisheries Centre. University of British Columbia Vancouver,British Columbia.

[10] HeSL,ZhangJP, XuMJ (2000). New Records of Fish and Fish Fauna in Hunan Province. Journal of Hunan Agricultural University (Natural Sciences) 26,379–382.

[11] HelfrichP,RiebE, AbramiG,Lücking A,MehlerA (2018). TreeAnnotator: Versatile visual annotation of hierarchical text relations. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association,France.

[12] HoangDT,Chernomor O,Von HaeselerA,MinhBQ,VinhLS (2018). UFBoot2: Improving the ultrafast bootstrap approximation. Molecular Biology and Evolution 35,518–522.

[13] HoraSL (1931). Classification of the Homalopterid fishes. Records of the Zoological Survey of India 33,67–69.

[14] HoraSL (1932). Classification, bionomics and evolution of Homalopterid fishes. Memoirs of the Indian Museum 12,261–330.

[15] HuangZJ,HeJG, TangJJ,Xu XP,ZhengJQ (2009). Germplasm resource investigation of wild freshwater fish in Beijiang River of Guangdong. Chinese Journal of Ecology 28,1489–1493.

[16] KalyaanamoorthyS,Minh BQ,WongTKF,Von Haeseler A, JermiinLS (2017). ModelFinder: Fast model selection for accurate phylogenetic estimates. Nature Methods 14,587–589.

[17] KottelatM (2001). Freshwater Fishes of Northern Vietnam: A Preliminary Check-list of the Fishes known or Expected to Occur in Northern Vietnam with Comments on Systematics and Nomenclature. World Bank,Washington, DC.

[18] KottelatM (2012). Conspectus Cobitidum: An Inventory of the Loaches of the World (Teleostei: Cypriniformes: Cobitoidei). Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. National University of Singapore Press,Singapore.

[19] KottelatM (2013). The Fishes of the Inland Waters of Southeast Asia: A Catalogue and Core Bibliography of the Fishes known to Occur in Freshwaters, Mangroves and Estuaries. Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. National University of Singapore,Singapore.

[20] LanfearR,Frandsen PB,WrightAM,SenfeldT,CalcottB (2017). PartitionFinder 2: New methods for selecting partitioned models of evolution for molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution 34,772–773.

[21] LiHJ,LinXT (2010). Preliminary study on fish communities in mountain forest streams in Western Guangdong. Jiangsu Agricultural Sciences 5,495–504.

[22] LiHJ,XieCX (2004). Funna composition and resources protection of freshwater fish in forest streams in the central north of Guangxi Province. Journal of Northeast Forestry University 32,89–93.

[23] LiJ,LuoJR, LiXH,TanXC, WangC,Guo SC (2007). Investigation of fish resources and analysis of resources decline along Lianjiang River. Freshwater Fisheries 37,49–53.

[24] LiSQ (1998). Study on the homalopterid fishes from Fujian Province. Journal of Fisheries of China 22,260–264.

[25] LiangYS (1942). Notes on some species of homalopterid loaches referring to Pseudogastromyzon from Fukien. Contributions from the Research Institute of Zoology and Botany, Fukien Provincial Academy 1,1–10.

[26] LiuXJ,QinJJ, AoXF et al. (2020). Species diversity of fish in the Luoxiao Mountains region. Biodiversity Science 28,889.

[27] MaiD (1978). Identification of the Fresh-Water Fishes of North Vietnam. Scientific & Technology Publisher,Ha Noi.

[28] MatzkeNJ (2013). BioGeoBEARS: BioGeography with Bayesian (and likelihood) evolutionary analysis in R Scripts. R package, version 0.2 1, 2013.

[29] NguyenLT,SchmidtHA, Von HaeselerA,MinhBQ (2015). IQ-TREE: A fast and effective stochastic algorithm for estimating maximum-likelihood phylogenies. Molecular Biology and Evolution 32,268–274.

[30] NicholsJT (1925). A new homalopterin loach from Fukien. American Museum Novitates (167),1–2.

[31] NicholsJT (1931). Crossostoma fangi, a new loach from near Canton, China. Lingnan Science Journal 10,263–264.

[32] PanJH,LiuCH, ZhengWB (1984). Study on the fish fauna of the Beijiang River, Guangdong Province. Journal of South China Normal University (Natural Science Edition) 1,27–40.

[33] RambautA (2018). FigTree v1.4.4. Available from URL: http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/

[34] RambautA,Drummond AJ,XieD,BaeleG,SuchardMA (2018). Posterior summarization in Bayesian phylogenetics using Tracer 1.7. Systematic Biology 67,901–904.

[35] RonquistF,Huelsenbeck JP (2003). MrBayes 3: Bayesian phylogenetic inference under mixed models. Bioinformatics 19,1572–1574.

[36] SauvageHE (1878). Note sur quelques Cyprinidae et Cobitidae d’espèces inédites, provenant des eaux douces de la Chine. Bulletin de la Société philomathique de Paris (7th Série) 2,86–90.

[37] SongBL (1992). Preliminary investigation on fishes in Jianjiang River. Journal of Zhanjiang Fisheiries College 12,83–86.

[38] SuchardMA,LemeyP, BaeleG,Ayres DL,DrummondAJ,RambautA (2018). Bayesian phylogenetic and phylodynamic data integration using BEAST 1.10. Virus Evolution 4,vey016.

[39] TamuraK,StecherG, KumarS (2021). MEGA11: Molecular evolutionary genetics analysis version 11. Molecular Biology and Evolution 38,3022–3027.

[40] TangWQ,ChenYY (1996). Ultrastructural observation on the chin adhesive apparatus and subgenus division of Pseudogastromyzon. Acta Zoologica Sinica 42,231–236.

[41] XiaX,XieZ (2001). DAMBE: software package for data analysis in molecular biology and evolution. Journal of Heredity 92,371–373.

[42] XiaoJL,DengWD, PengHY,Qiu HW,LiRS. (2021). Preliminary analysis of fish biodiversity in Guangdong Shixing Nanshan Provincial Nature Reserve. Journal of Shaoguan University·Natural Science 42,55–60.

[43] XiaoWH,ZhangYP (2000). Genetics and evolution of mitochondrial DNA in fish. Acta Hydrobiologica Sinica 24,384–391.

[44] XuMY,GuoLD, GuSQ et al. (2020). TGS-GapCloser: a fast and accurate gap closer for large genomes with low coverage of error-prone long reads. GigaScience 9,giaa094.

[45] YuY,HarrisAJ, BlairC,He X (2015). RASP (Reconstruct Ancestral State in Phylogenies): A tool for historical biogeography. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 87,46–49.

[46] YuanSB,LiuSQ, XiangY et al. (2020). Current status and protection countermeasures of fish fauna structure of Centian River National Wetland Park in Jianghua, Hunan. Biotic Resources 42,644–651.

[47] ZhangD,GaoFL, JakovlićL,ZouH et al. (2020). PhyloSuite: An integrated and scalable desktop platform for streamlined molecular sequence data management and evolutionary phylogenetics studies. Molecular Ecology Resources 20,348–355.

[48] ZhengCY,ChenYY (1980). The homalopterid fishes from Guangdong Province, China. Acta Zootaxonomica Sinica 5,89–101.

[49] ZhengCY,LiJP (1986). A preliminary review of the genus Pseudogastromyzon (Homalopteridae, Cyprinidae) of China. Journal of Science and Medicine of Jinan University 1,75–84.

[50] ZhengCY (1981). The homalopterid fishes from Guangdong province, China (continuity). Journal of Jinan University (Natural Science & Medicine Edition) 1,55–63.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2023 The Authors. Integrative Zoology published by International Society of Zoological Sciences, Institute of Zoology/Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.