Uso de herramientas bioinformáticas para el análisis filogenético de las especies de la subfamilia triatominae vectores de la enfermedad de chagas

Abstract

Chagas disease is one of the most damaging parasitic infections in Latin America that is still ignored. The knowledge about the phylogeny of its vector insects, the Triatominae (Hemiptera: Reduviidae), is very scarce. The main objective of this study is to provide, for the first time, a phylogenetic analysis of the triatomines that includes the 154 existing species, using the combination of molecular and morphological markers for the construction of the phylogeny.To obtain the combined phylogenetic tree (molecular and morphological markers), 14 molecular markers were taken from the GenBank nucleotide database (NCBI), which were analyzed and aligned using the Geneious application of the Geneious R11 platform. Subsequently, the matrix with the concatenated sequences was built with the use of the SequenceMatrix Version 1.8 program. Mining of data from bibliographic sources was also performed, in which 63 key characters were obtained, useful as morphological markers, which were coded in MorphoBank to obtain the matrix. Finally, both matrices were combined manually and the combined maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis was carried out with the help of the IQ-TREE program v1.6.9. The phylogenetic analysis carried out with bioinformatic tools demonstrates that morphological and molecular phylogenies generate remarkably similar trees that validate each other. The combined tree demonstrates the monophyly of the subfamily and paraphilia in genera within the Rhodniini (Rhodnius and Psammolestes) and Triatomini (Triatoma and Panstrogylus) tribes. Likewise, 5 tribes are clearly evident: Alberproseniini, Bolboderini, Cavernicolini, Rhodniini and Triatomini.