Complete Mitochondrial Genome of Phoneutria Boliviensis (Araneae, Ctenidae): New Insights Into the Phylogeny and Evolution of Spider

Abstract

Spiders are the most abundant land predators and megadiverse on earth. In recent years, the mitochondrial genome has been sequenced, mainly for ecological and commercial purposes, reporting some level of rearrangements in this genome. However, there is poor genetic information in several taxonomic families of spiders. The aim of this study was to obtain the sequence of the complete genome of Phoneutria boliviensis and, based on this, extract the mitogenomes of other species of the family Ctenidae from published transcriptomes to perform a comparative study among spider species to determine the relationship between the level of mitochondrial rearrangement and its possible relationship with molecular variability in spiders. Complete mitochondrial genomes of eighteen spiders (including nine Ctenidae species) were obtained by two different methodologies (sequencing and transcriptome extraction). Fifty-eight spider mitochondrial genomes were downloaded from the NCBI database for gene order analysis. After verifying the annotation of each mitochondrial gene, a phylogeny and gene order, analysis from 76 spider mitochondrial genomes was obtained. Our results show a high rate of annotation error in the mitochondrial genomes of spiders published in databases, which could lead to false phylogenetic relationships. Moreover, to provide new mitochondrial genomes in spiders by two different methodologies to obtain them, our analysis identifies six different mitochondrial architectures among all spiders. Translocation or tandem duplication random loss (TDRL) events in tRNA genes were identified to explain the evolution of the spider mitochondrial genome. In addition, our findings provide new insights into spider mitochondrial evolution.