Meeting Abstract
For the majority of the twentieth century, mosquito genera were defined by morphological characters useful in differential identification. Since 2000, there has been a rapid increase in the number of genera within the family, primarily due to the elevation of subgenera from within the genus Aedes. These elevations were based upon cladistics analyses of morphological characters. More recently, additional analyses with the same characters called into question the elevation of these genera. Given the conflicting results of morphological analyses, the need for a molecular phylogeny of the medically important Aedes was apparent. Here we present the results from the most comprehensive molecular phylogeny of mosquitoes to date, with a particular focus on the genus Aedes, including more than seventy mosquito species. We used a database-driven approach in R to build a supermatrix from five gene regions for use in subsequent analyses in RAxML and PhyML. We discuss our results, including implications for the monophyly of the genus Aedes. Finally, we highlight the usefulness of this phylogeny in future comparative studies, and discuss future directions to resolve lingering naming questions within the genus Aedes.
