The mitochondrial genome of the stingless bee Melipona bicolor (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini): sequence, gene organization and a unique tRNA translocation event conserved across the tribe Meliponini

Abstract

At present a complete mtDNA sequence has been reported for only two hymenopterans, the Old World honey bee, Apis mellifera and the sawfly Perga condei. Among the bee group, the tribe Meliponini (stingless bees) has some distinction due to its Pantropical distribution, great number of species and large importance as main pollinators in several ecosystems, including the Brazilian rain forest. However few molecular studies have been conducted on this group of bees and few sequence data from mitochondrial genomes have been described. In this project, we PCR amplified and sequenced 78% of the mitochondrial genome of the stingless bee Melipona bicolor (Apidae, Meliponini). The sequenced region contains all of the 13 mitochondrial protein-coding genes, 18 of 22 tRNA genes, and both rRNA genes (one of them was partially sequenced). We also report the genome organization (gene content and order), gene translation, genetic code, and other molecular features, such as base frequencies, codon usage, gene initiation and termination. We compare these characteristics of M. bicolor to those of the mitochondrial genome of A. mellifera and other insects. A highly biased A+T content is a typical characteristic of the A. mellifera mitochondrial genome and it was even more extreme in that of M. bicolor. Length and compositional differences between M. bicolor and A. mellifera genes were detected and the gene order was compared. Eleven tRNA gene translocations were observed between these two species. This latter finding was surprising, considering the taxonomic proximity of these two bee tribes. The tRNA Lys gene translocation was investigated within Meliponini and showed high conservation across the Pantropical range of the tribe

Molecular Identification of Forensically Important Indian Species of Flesh Flies (Diptera: Sarcophagidae) by Using COI Gene of Mitochondrial DNA

“…The A+T content observed during the present study was found out to be in agreement to the characteristics of the base composition of the mitochondrial genome of other dipteran insects (ranging from 72.6% to 82.2%) [34]. Silvestre et al [35] suggested that one hypothesis that attempts to explain A+T bias is that the DNA polymerase could use these bases in a more efficient way during mtDNA replication [36]. Sharma et al [25] showed average nucleotide composition for ten species as T=37.20%, A=29.19%, C=16.61% and G=17.00%.…”

Mitochondrial DNA variability in populations of Centris aenea (Hymenoptera, Apidae), a crop-pollinating bee in Brazil

“…In A. mellifera subspecies, the COI/COII region was considerably longer and had variable length due to up to 450 bp in the intergenic region (noncoding region between the RNAtLeu and COII genes), which normally ranges from 200 to 650 bp (Cornuet and Garnery, 1991). Sequencing of the mitochondrial genome of Melipona bicolor (Silvestre et al, 2008) confirmed that the intergenic region is not present in Melipona, Plebeia (Francisco et al, 2001), or Partamona (Brito and Arias, 2005). We amplified the COI/COII region in C. aenea with the same primers used for A. mellifera and Melipona species, which suggests that C. aenea also lacks the intergenic region, as do the meliponine bees (Francisco et al, 2001;Brito and Arias, 2005).…”

Phylogeography and historical demography of the neotropical stingless beeMelipona quadrifasciata(Hymenoptera, Apidae): incongruence between morphology and mitochondrial DNA

“…Sequences were aligned using the CLUSTAL W method (Higgins et al, 1994) available in the software MEGA4 (Tamura et al, 2007) and compared to the complete COI sequence of M. bicolor (Silvestre et al, 2008). All alignments were inspected and corrected visually.…”