Scientists Construct the Evolutionary History of Butterflies with New DNA Advances

With their colorful patterns and bright wings, butterflies have captured the hearts and imaginations of people across the globe. Now, scientists are learning a bit more about these beautiful insects; they've traced nearly 3,000 genes to find the earliest common ancestor of butterflies and moths, creating an extensive evolutionary tree.

In order to learn more about the evolutionary roots of butterflies, the researchers employed next-generation sequencing, which is a method used to rapidly process large amounts of DNA. The scientists developed an initial sample of 46 species that represent many of the most bio diverse groups of moths and butterflies. They also combined 33 new transcriptomes, a set of RNA molecules, with 13 genomes.

"This project advances biodiversity research by providing and evolutionary foundation for a very diverse group of insets, with nearly 160,000 described species," said Akito Kawahara, one of the researchers, in a news release. "With a tree, we can now understand how the majority of butterfly and moth species evolved."

Among the findings, the scientists discovered that butterflies are more closely related to small moths than large ones. This actually changes the understanding of how butterflies evolved. In addition, the researchers found that butterflies are probably the ancestral group to the tens of thousands of moth species found on the planet and that the Hedylidae family, commonly known as American butterfly-moths, were dismissed as moths and found to be true butterflies.

"This study adds to a growing body of knowledge by bringing new techniques to the table and conclusively demonstrating the evolutionary relationships of the most popular insects on the planet," said Daniel Rubinoff, one of the researchers. "The methods are novel and build on previous work. This is clearly the future of deep-level evolutionary research."

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.