The last Xerces blue butterfly was seen in the early 1940s, and its extinction is credited to human urban development. This butterfly has become a North American icon for insect conservation, but some have questioned whether it was truly a distinct species, or simply an isolated population of another living species. To address this question, we leveraged next-generation sequencing using a 93-year-old museum specimen. We applied a genome skimming strategy that aimed for the organellar genome and high-copy fractions of the nuclear genome by a shallow sequencing approach. From these data, we were able to recover over 200 million nucleotides, which assembled into several phylogenetically informative markers and the near-complete mitochondrial genome. From our phylogenetic analyses and haplotype network analysis we conclude that the Xerces blue butterfly was a distinct species driven to extinction.

最后一只 Xerces 蓝蝴蝶出现在 1940 年代初期，它的灭绝归功于人类城市发展。这只蝴蝶已成为北美昆虫保护的象征，但有些人质疑它是否真的是一个独特的物种，或者仅仅是另一个活物种的孤立种群。为了解决这个问题，我们利用具有 93 年历史的博物馆标本利用下一代测序。我们应用了基因组略读策略，通过浅测序方法针对细胞器基因组和核基因组的高拷贝部分。从这些数据中，我们能够恢复超过 2 亿个核苷酸，这些核苷酸组装成几个系统发育信息标记和近乎完整的线粒体基因组。