ИСТИНА

Up to now the main concepts of phylogeny and taxonomy of moles of East Asia are mainly based on the morphology of the skull, teeth and postcranial skeleton. However, craniological and dental features are very variable so they are not enough reliable for phylogenetic reconstructions. Postcranial skeleton provides us valuable features, but the full skeletons are rare in the museum collections. Molecular studies of East Asian moles are at the very first stage, presumably based on mitochondrial genes and cover the incomplete taxonomic samples. So, in spite of the long-term efforts to reconstruct the phylogeny and taxonomic relationships of Talpidae, the moles from East Asian region have difficulty for the species identification. We analyzed original and GenBank data on seven species of the genus Mogera, five species of the genus Euroscaptor and Scaptochirus. The complete mitochondrial gene cytb and fragments of the two nuclear genes - exones RAG1 and BRCA1, were amplified and sequenced. The data were analysed using the maximum likelihood, parsimony and neighbour-joining phylogenetic algorithms. As a result, a similar tree topology both for three different genes and three different algorithms was found. It has been found that Euroscaptor in its current sense is not monophyletic group due to Scaptochirus which is appeared within the genus Euroscaptor and very distinct position of E. mizura. It follows that (i) E. mizura is not related to the genus Euroscaptor but represents a separate genus; and (ii) Scaptochirus does not represent a separate genus but could be considered as Euroscaptor. Within the genus Mogera, the problem of the taxonomic affinity of small mogeras of South Primorye is still unresolved and their allocation to M. wogura is provisional since the available genetic data do not support occurrence of this species in samples from that region. M. i. latouchei, which is regarded as a subspecies of M. insularis, occupies very isolated position on all the resulting trees. M. tokudae and M. imaizumii form a group on the nuclear tree, but we didn’t find this grouping on the mitochondrial tree. E.mizura doesn't show a tendency to form a monophyletic group with other species of the genus. Among Euroscaptor moles E. longirostris and E. malayana are the nearest species. E. parvidens is interested by its deep intraspecific divergence which is similar to the interspecific level. The recently described species E. subanura forms a sister group with E. parvidens.