Because of its rich morphological diversity, butterfly since Darwin's time as a species, one of the important groups of adaptive evolution in recent years, more is considered to be genetic research form, the ideal model of evolution and development, has become a developmental biology, evolutionary biology, population genetics and conservation biology and ecology research in the field of one of the important model organisms.

In 2015, the scientific research team completed the genome of all butterfly species of kingdee and its related species of citrus kingdee, and realized gene editing of wild insects for the first time. On this basis, in order to better explore the genetic basis of the evolution of phenotypic diversity such as butterfly morphology at a larger scale of butterfly phylogeny, the butterfly lineage genome project was launched in 2017. As the first step and foundation of butterfly spectrum genome project, the team used streaming technology to determine covers all division and distribution of China almost all subfamily C values of the genomes of 67 species of butterfly and by using the second generation sequencing technology to assembly of the mitochondrial genome, including 1 subfamily 23 59 species of mitochondrial genome is reported for the first time.

The results showed that the genome size of butterflies ranged from 0.203pg(199Mb) to 1.287pg(1253Mb), with a difference of 6.4 times. The largest differences were found in the family papilionidae (5.9 times 0.22-1.29pg), followed by the family nymphalidae (4.8 times 0.2-0.95pg), the family polygonidae (4.4 times 0.22-0.97pg), the family polygonidae (2.6 times 0.39-1.02pg), the family polygonidae (2.2 times 0.3-0.66pg) and the family polygonidae (1.8 times 0.48-0.87pg). The results also showed that the size of the ancestor genome of the butterfly was about 0.5pg, and the variation of the size of the genome of some ancestors of different subfamilies or groups resulted in the diversity variation of the size of the genome of the living butterfly.

Time:2020.01.17

Source: Chinese academy of sciences