Complete mitochondrial genome of Buffon’s river garfish Zenarchopterus buffonis (Valenciennes, 1847)

Abstract

The complete mitochondrial genome of Buffon's river garfish Zenarchopterus buffonis from South China Sea has been obtained for the first time. It is 16,462 bp long, and contains 21 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes, 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), and 1 control region. The overall base composition is significantly biased (A, G, T, and C was 33%, 12.94%, 29.78%, and 24.27%, respectively) with A þ T contents of 62.79%. In total, most PCGs use the initiation codon ATG except COX1 uses GTG. Seven PCGs have a complete codon TAA or TAG, whereas the other six genes end with the incomplete stop codon T-or TA-. Phylogenetic analysis showed that Z. buffonis forms a monophyletic cluster with the species of Belonidae, Zenarchopteridae, and Sconberesocidae.

Stronger selective constraints on the mitochondrial genome in flying fishes

“…In this study, based on the results of phylogenetic trees from previous studies (Toyama et al, 2020;Daane et al, 2021), the classification information from the NCBI Taxonomy Browser (Schoch et al, 2020) was adopted, which divided the sauries (Scomberesocidae) into the family Belonidae and also gave family status (Zenarchopteridae) to the freshwater halfbeaks. The phylogenetic trees based on 13 concatenated PCGs showed a similar topology to the previous molecular phylogenetic analyses based on mitochondrial genome sequences (Cui et al, 2018;Lü et al, 2018;Zhu et al, 2018;Tan et al, 2019), showing that the ricefishes (Adrianichthyidae) were at the base of the phylogenetic tree, the freshwater halfbeaks (Zenarchopteridae) were nested within the needlefishes (Belonidae), and the flying fishes (Exocoetidae) were nested within the marine halfbeaks (Hemiramphidae). However, the results of research by Lovejoy (2000); Lovejoy (2004) based on mtDNA and nuclear loci, revealed a sister relationship between needlefishes and the freshwater halfbeaks, which was consistent with the morphologically based analysis of Beloniformes phylogenetic relationships (Toyama et al, 2020) and the reconstruct the phylogeny of the Beloniformes based on 4683 genes (Daane et al, 2021).…”