The complete mitochondrial genome of the Ctenophore Beroe cucumis, a mitochondrial genome showing rapid evolutionary rates

Abstract

We described the complete mitochondrial genome of the Ctenophore Beroe cucumis, which is a circular molecule of 10,487 bp in length. The new mitochondrial genome comprised only 12 genes, making it one of the smallest animals’ mtDNA. Both nucleotide substitution and gene order rearrangements exhibited extreme high evolutionary rate in mitogenomes of Ctenophore. The phylogenetic analysis based on mitogenomics failed to reveal the basal position of Ctenophore within metazoan, owing to the extreme evolutionary rate. Based on the available Ctenophora mitogenomes, we found the optimized primers designed by Geller et al. for DNA barcoding suited for the taxon.

Keywords

• ctenophora
• mitochondrial genomes
• dna barcoding