Abstract
Helicoidea is a diverse group of land snails with a global distribution. While much is known regarding the relationships of helicoid taxa, comparatively little is known about the evolution of the mitochondrial genome in the superfamily. We sequenced two complete mitochondrial genomes from Praticolella mexicana Perez, 2011 representing the first such data from the helicoid family Polygyridae, and used them in an evolutionary analysis of mitogenomic gene order. We found the mitochondrial genome of Praticolella mexicana to be 14,008 bp in size, possessing the typical 37 metazoan genes. Multiple alternate stop codons are used, as are incomplete stop codons. Mitogenome size and nucleotide content is consistent with other helicoid species. Our analysis of gene order suggested that Helicoidea has undergone four mitochondrial rearrangements in the past. Two rearrangements were limited to tRNA genes only, and two involved protein coding genes.
Highlights
Helicoidea (Mollusca, Gastropoda) is a globally distributed and diverse superfamily of terrestrial mollusks
12 million sequences reads derived from the UTRGV P. mexicana sample assembled into over 450,000 contigs, the largest of which was 14,275 bp in length
Gastropod mitogenomes tend to be compact (Boore 1999) even while carrying noncoding regions of varying sizes (Grande et al 2008). Both mitogenomes sequenced from P. mexicana encode the standard 37 metazoan genes and possess intergenic non-coding regions
Summary
Helicoidea (Mollusca, Gastropoda) is a globally distributed and diverse superfamily of terrestrial mollusks (reviewed in Razkin et al 2015). Many mitochondrial gene order rearrangements represent rare events that serve as homoplasy-free evidence of common ancestry (Boore and Brown 1998, Rokas and Holland 2000, Gribaldo and Philippe 2002) provided they carry sufficient phylogenetic information (Yang 1998). In mollusks, these classes of genetic variation can occur within the same family or genus (Milbury and Gaffney 2005, Rawlings et al 2010). The degree of genetic rearrangements and variability within and among helicoid mitogenomes, is poorly understood
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