Abstract: Coleoptera is the largest group of all organismal lineages in the world with very high diversity of morphology and ecology. These rich diversity has been attracted many attention by many evolutionary biologists and taxonomists. Along with the development of molecular biology, the molecular biology techniques are widely used for studying the phylogeny of Coleoptera. However, simple molecular fragments can not meet the research requirements. New molecular markers need to be explored. Recently, the mitochondrial genome has become one of the important molecular markers to explore different categories of Coleoptera. In this article, the research progress in mitochondrial genomes of Coleoptera was addressed, and some problems in the application of mitochondrial genomes of Coleoptera were also discussed. So far, the studies of mitochondrial genomes of beetles have mainly focused on gene arrangement and structure of mitochondrial genome, molecular phylogenetics and molecular evolution. Mitochondrial genome has shown many advantages to address the phylogeny and evolution of beetles. However, there are some disadvantages too, such as difficulty to get sequences, simplex gene type, different evolutionary rates, limited application and so on.

Key words: Coleoptera, molecular phylogenetics, mitochondrial genome, molecular marker, molecular evolution, higher categories