Mitochondrial genomes of Anopheles arabiensis, An. gambiae and An. coluzzii show no clear species division.

Mark J Hanemaaijer,Anthony J Cornel,Parker D Houston,Yoosook Lee,Abdrahamane Fofana,Gregory C Lanzaro,Travis C Collier,Laura C Norris

doi:10.12688/f1000research.13807.2

Mark J Hanemaaijer, Anthony J Cornel + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.13807.2

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Abstract

Here we report the complete mitochondrial sequences of 70 individual field collected mosquito specimens from throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. We generated this dataset to identify species specific markers for the following Anopheles species and chromosomal forms: An. arabiensis, An. coluzzii (The Forest and Mopti chromosomal forms) and An. gambiae (The Bamako and Savannah chromosomal forms). The raw Illumina sequencing reads were mapped to the NC_002084 reference mitogenome sequence. A total of 783 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected on the mitochondrial genome, of which 460 are singletons (58.7%). None of these SNPs are suitable as molecular markers to distinguish among An. arabiensis, An. coluzzii and An. gambiae or any of the chromosomal forms. The lack of species or chromosomal form specific markers is also reflected in the constructed phylogenetic tree, which shows no clear division among the operational taxonomic units considered here.

Highlights

MtDNA sequence has been used in taxonomy as a source of species diagnostic markers (Cronin et al (1991); De Barba et al (2014); Pegg et al (2006)) or in population genetics and evolutionary studies (Fu et al (2013); Harrison (1989); Llamas et al (2016))
We identified a total of 783 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) over the entire mitogenome
An. arabiensis, An. coluzzii and An. gambiae did not cluster separately, which is consistent with previous reports that compared mitochondrial genome sequence data from specimens originating from Kenya, Senegal and South Africa (Besansky et al (1997)) and Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Kenya, Mali, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (Fontaine et al (2015), Supplemental material)

Summary

Introduction

MtDNA sequence has been used in taxonomy as a source of species diagnostic markers (Cronin et al (1991); De Barba et al (2014); Pegg et al (2006)) or in population genetics and evolutionary studies (Fu et al (2013); Harrison (1989); Llamas et al (2016)). One advantage of using mitochondrial over nuclear DNA for such studies is that the mutation rate of mtDNA is about 10 times faster than nuclear DNA (Brown et al (1979); Haag-Liautard et al (2008)), amplifying the evolutionary trajectory of populations and species. MtDNA is easy to amplify, because there are more copies of mitochondrial DNA relative to nuclear DNA. Universal primers can be applied to a wide range of species. Please revise : “morphologically identical species that can only be distinguished with molecular markers” (Scott et al., Please revise : “morphologically identical species that can only be distinguished with molecular markers” (Scott et al, 1993; Coetzee et al, 2013)

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