A genomic portrait of Sturnira parvidens: mitochondrial chromosome, repetitive elements, and microsatellite discovery

Abstract

The yellow-shouldered bat, Sturnira parvidens (Phyllostomidae), is an abundant and widespread species in southern North America and Mesoamerica. Despite its important ecological role, no genomic resources exist for this species. Using low-coverage short Illumina 150 bp pair-end reads sequencing, this study reports the mitochondrial chromosome and nuclear repetitive elements, including microsatellites, in S. parvidens. The mitochondrial genome of S. parvidens is 16,612 bp in length and is comprised of 13 protein-coding genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, and 22 transfer RNA genes. Repetitive elements constituted ~67% of the nuclear genome while ~33% of the genome represented single- or low-copy sequences. A moderate proportion of repetitive sequences (31% putative families) could not be assigned to known repeat element families. Considering only annotated repetitive elements, the most ubiquitous repetitive elements belonged to Class I-LINE and Satellite DNA, which were considerably more abundant than Class I-LTR elements and Class II-DNA transposons (TcMar-Mariner and hAT-Charlie). A total of 193 microsatellites were identified.