Abstract
A complete mitochondrial genome of the Roman snail Helixpomatia Linnaeus, 1758 has been sequenced. The length and gene order correspond to that of other available helicid mitogenomes. We used the mitogenome sequence to reappraise the relationships among the four presumed principal groups of the helicid subfamily Helicinae. The results support the idea that the subfamily is divided between two western Palaearctic diversification centres: Iberian Peninsula and western Maghreb in the west, and Anatolia, the Aegean and Caucasus in the east. One group, the tribe Helicini, diversified in the east and the remaining three currently recognised tribes in the west. However, the exact relationships among lineages of the non-Helicini tribes could not be resolved.
Highlights
Phylogenetic research on land snails has been far dominated by studies based on mitochondrial markers, mostly partial sequences of the cox1 (COI) and rrnL (16S rRNA) genes, not exceeding 2000 bp in total
We looked for start- and stop-codons whose positions would be compatible between H. pomatia and the other three species, and considered the positions of adjacent genes
We have sequenced a complete mitogenome of H. pomatia, from a specimen representative of a common central-European lineage (Korábek et al 2018) of this broadly distributed snail species
Summary
Phylogenetic research on land snails has been far dominated by studies based on mitochondrial markers, mostly partial sequences of the cox (COI) and rrnL (16S rRNA) genes, not exceeding 2000 bp in total. These genes dominate in terms of the amount of sequences generated, but usually by the variability of the se-. Modern techniques targeting many loci simultaneously begin to advance into the phylogenetics of pulmonate land snails (Teasdale et al 2016), the mitochondrial markers will likely continue to be used due to relatively low costs and accessibility of the methods, but especially thanks to the wealth of previously published data. One of the best resolved backbone phylogenies of Stylommatophora to date was reconstructed from mitochondrial genome sequences (Groenenberg et al 2017)
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