The complete mitochondrial genome of the jumping plant bug Halticus minutus Reuter, 1885 (Hemiptera: Miridae)

Abstract The complete mitochondrial genome of Halticus minutus was sequenced and analyzed in this study. The mitochondrial genome is 15,403 bp in size and comprises 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, two rRNA genes, and one control region (D-loop). The nucleotide composition of the mitogenome is 41.81% A, 32.50% T, 10.43% G, and 15.26% C. Despite only a few references available on the complete mitochondrial genome of Miridae, phylogenetic analysis suggested that H. minutus is most closely related to Nesidiocoris tenuis.

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) is a major dry grain and feed crop worldwide, which also serves as industrial and food raw material and horticultural crop. China is the largest producer of sweet potatoes globally. The annual planting area of sweet potato was 2.4 million hectares (Wang et al. 2021). The jumping plant bug Halticus minutus Reuter, 1885 (Hemiptera: Miridae) is widely distributed in Asia (Amalin and Vasquez 1993;Eyles 2005). Halticus minutus has diverse host plants, including sweet potato, bean, corn, wheat, barley, eggplant, tobacco, cotton, and alfalfa (Henry 1983;Wu and Yang 1987). In China, H. minutus is one of the most common sweet potato pests and is considered an economically important pest in sweet potato and soybean (Tong and Wang 1987). However, genomic information of H. minutus is scanty. In the present study, we sequenced the intact mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of H. minutus. Further, we characterized the complete mitochondrial genome and determined its phylogenetic relationship with other close species. The findings of this study provide a basis for future molecular studies of H. minutus.
The complete mitochondrial genome of H. minutus consists of double-stranded circular molecules with a length of 15,403 bp. It also contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, and two rRNA genes. The nucleotide composition of the complete mtDNA is 74.31% A þ T and 25.69% G þ C, indicating a significant A and T bias. Phylogenetic analysis was performed using 18 complete mitochondrial genomes, including Corythucha ciliata (Say, 1832) (Hemiptera: Tingidae) and C. marmorata (Uhler, 1878) (Hemiptera: Tingidae) as outgroups. The complete mitochondrial genomic sequences among the species were aligned using MAFFT. The best partition scheme and substitution models were identified using PartitionFinder v1.1.1 (Lanfear et al. 2012). The maximumlikelihood (ML) tree was constructed using RAXML8.2.9 (Stamatakis 2014) with 1000 bootstraps. GRT was selected as the best-fit model according to Modeltest3.7 (Posada and Crandall 1998). The Bayesian analysis was also performed using MrBayes 3.2 (Ronquist et al. 2012). Based on the phylogenetic tree analysis, the mitochondrial sequences of H. minutus formed a single clade (Figure 1), indicating a relatively close relationship with the clade formed by two mitochondrial sequences of Nesidiocoris tenuis (Reuter, 1895) (Heteroptera: Miridae).

Ethical approval
This study has been granted an exemption by the ethics committee of Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Specific permission is not needed, because no relevant animals were involved.

Author contributions
Zhong C and Huang L conceived and designed the study. All authors (Zhongda C, Huang M, Li K, Zou H, and Huang L) analyzed and interpreted the results. Zhong C and Huang L drafted the manuscript. All authors critically revised it for intellectual content and approved the final version to be published. All authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GenBank of NCBI at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, reference number OL693690. The associated BioProject, BioSample, and SRA numbers are PRJNA809507, SAMN26182809, and SRR18131583, respectively.