Mitochondrial genomes of Anopheles arabiensis, An. gambiae and An. coluzzii show no clear species division

Abstract

Here we report the complete mitochondrial sequences of 70 individual field collected mosquito specimens from throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. We generated this dataset to identify species specific markers for the following Anopheles species and chromosomal forms: An. arabiensis, An. coluzzii (The Forest and Mopti chromosomal forms) and An. gambiae (The Bamako and Savannah chromosomal forms). The raw Illumina sequencing reads were mapped to the NC_002084 reference mitogenome sequence. A total of 783 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected on the mitochondrial genome, of which 460 are singletons (58.7%). None of these SNPs are suitable as molecular markers to distinguish among An. arabiensis, An. coluzzii and An. gambiae or any of the chromosomal forms. The lack of species or chromosomal form specific markers is also reflected in the constructed phylogenetic tree, which shows no clear division among the operational taxonomic units considered here.

Characterization of the complete mitogenome of Anopheles aquasalis, and phylogenetic divergences among Anopheles from diverse geographic zones

“…The publication of 16 anopheles genomes [8] might have generated, concomitantly, mitogenomes that will broaden our perspective on the phylogenetic and divergence relationships between the members of the Anopheles genus. This would be particularly important since both our study, and Logue et al ., (2013) [6], encountered the paradoxical situation regarding the scarcity of mitogenomes from dominant malaria vectors pertaining to Africa (until recently) [76, 77] and the East Mediterranean regions, areas still burdened by human malaria [78]. For instance, at the time of our study, we opted to leave out the mitogenome of Anopheles funestus due the amount of gaps in the mtDNA PCGs sequences (GenBank accession number NC008070).…”

The origin of island populations of the African malaria mosquito, Anopheles coluzzii

“…Mitogenome variant calling were generated assuming single ploidy using Freebayes v1.2.0. Singletons and SNPs in an AT-rich region were removed from further analysis due to low coverage 67 . A neighbor-joining tree was constructed with Nei’s distance matrix and 1000 bootstrap replicates using the R package ape 5.4 68 .…”

A Minimally Morphologically Destructive Approach for DNA Retrieval and Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing of Pinned Historic Dipteran Vector Species

“…As for the consensus mitochondrial genomes, we compared them with NCBI available genomes, some of which were published mitochondrial phylogenies of species in the An. gambiae complex ( Beard et al 1993 ; Peng et al 2016 ; Hanemaaijer et al 2018 ) and An. funestus complex ( Hua et al 2016 ; Peng et al 2016 ; Jones et al 2018 ; Liu et al 2019 ; Small et al 2020 ), and created maximum likelihood trees using MAFFT and FastTree incorporating both present-day samples and historic specimens ( supplementary figs.…”