Species affiliation of the complete mitochondrial genome of Daurian ground squirrel Spermophilus dauricus Brandt, 1843 (Rodentia, Sciuridae)

Abstract

The complete mitochondrial genome of Daurian ground squirrel ( Spermophilus dauricus ) (Genbank NCBI KR534854) was tested by comparison with mtDNA markers isolated from Sciurus vulgaris mitochondrial genome and S. dauricus samples with reliable species diagnose. A high similarity between KR534854 and S. vulgaris was found but not with S. dauricus . It seems that the mitochondrion (KR534854) belongs not to S. dauricus but to one of the species of the genus Sciurus . Monophylies of Xerinae and Sciurinae were tested by using mtDNA control region. The monophyly of Xerinae is supported by mtDNA data provided the KR534854 sequence is excluded from an analysis.

First complete mitochondrial genome of the Alashan ground squirrel ( Spermophilus alashanicus ) (Rodentia: Sciuridae) from Ningxia, China

“…Sequences were selected based on a query coverage above 98% and percent identity greater than 87% from GenBank BLAST results. We excluded a mitogenome sequence of Spermophilus dauricus (KR534854) because this sequence has been re-identified as Sciurus vulgaris (Kapustina and Brandler 2017 ). Each of the 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs) was individually aligned using ClustalW with default settings before concatenation into a single multiple sequence alignment.…”