Fig. 2

Phylogenetic analysis of Argonaute proteins. The tree was constructed based on the alignments of the conserved PIWI domain of Argonaute homologs identified in the studied Acari species: Varroa destructor (Vd), Varroa jacobsoni (Vj), Tetranychus urticae (Tu), Ixodes scapularis (Is), Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus (Dp), Tropilaelaps mercedesae (Tm), Euroglyphus maynei (Em), Metaseiulus occidentalis (Mo) and Sarcoptes scabiei (Ss) using MAFFT [42]. Homologs of these proteins in Caenorhabditis elegans (Ce), Drosophila melanogaster (Dm), Tribolium castaneum (Tc), Psoroptes ovis (Po) and Dermatophagoides farinae (Df) were also included in this tree. The species names were abbreviated for convenience and the letters (a, b, c, d, e, f, g and h) following the names of some species indicate the number of protein copies found in their genomes. The tree was constructed using PhyML [43], with the model recommended by Lefort et al. [44] under the Akaike information criterion (AIC) (LG + G) with 500 bootstrap replicates