The complete mitochondrial genomes of two globally invasive ants, the Argentine ant Linepithema humile and the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata

Abstract

Ants are among the most widespread and damaging of invasive alien species. Here, we report the complete mitochondrial genomes for two globally invasive ants: the Argentine ant Linepithema humile and the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata. The circular genomes of L. humile and W. auropunctata are 15,929 and 16,362 bp in length, respectively, and encode the same typical set of 37 mitochondrial genes (i.e. 13 PCGs, 22 tRNAs and two rRNAs) and one control region. The mitochondrial genome of W. auropunctata harbors a unique gene arrangement ('rrnS-trnV-CR-trnM-trnI-trnQ-nad2-trnW-trnC-trnY'; the underlines indicate inverted genes) between rrnL and cox1. Phylogenetic analysis largely corroborated the traditional taxonomy, except for L. humile which was found to be more related to those taxa of the subfamilies Formicinae and Myrmicinae than to the consubfamilial Leptomyrmex pallens. Our genomic data can be readily used for genetic assays of these two globally invasive ants.

The complete mitochondrial genome of Siberian odorous ant, Dolichoderus sibiricus Emery, 1889 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

“…The tRNAs size ranges from 63 to 75 bp, are similar to other ants (circa 54-90 bp). Despite that tribe of D. sibiricus (tribe Dolicoderini) is different from that of Linepithema humile (tribe Leptomyrmecini), gene order of two species is exactly same (Duan et al 2016); while order of tRNA is different between D. sibiricus and Leptomyrmex pallens (Berman et al 2014) and Dorymyrmex brunneus (MG253267) in tribe Leptomyrmecini. The control region presumably corresponds to the single largest non-coding AT-rich region (622 bp, A þ T 94.4%).…”

Peer Review #2 of "Accessible molecular phylogenomics at no cost: obtaining 14 new mitogenomes for the ant subfamily Pseudomyrmecinae from public data (v0.1)"

“…Regardless of the limited sample of complete mitochondrial genomes analyzed for ants, in general, five slightly different synteny rearrangements ( Figure 2) could be observed in Formicidae family (Duan, Peng & Qian, 2016). All Pseudomyrmecinae and Dolichoderinae mitogenomes analyzed showed a single conserved gene arrangement for all species that is also shared by most of Formicinae species.…”

“…Mitochondrial genomes are poorly sampled for many taxa and therefore our current knowledge about evolutionary biology of many clades could be improved with the use of public data. Being primarily maternally inherited and non-recombinant, such sequences are often used to study evolutionary biology (Finstermeier et al, 2013;Krzemińska et al, 2017), population genetics (Pečnerová et al, 2017;Kılınç et al, 2018), phylogeography (Chang et al, 2017;Fields et al, 2018), systematics (Lin et al, 2017;Crainey et al, 2018) and conservation (Moritz, 1994;Rubinoff, 2006;Rosel et al, 2017) of various clades (Avise, 1994), specially from subsampled taxa (Gotzek, Clarke & Shoemaker, 2010;Duan, Peng & Qian, 2016) and non-model organisms (Prosdocimi et al, 2012;Tilak et al, 2014;Plese et al, 2018).…”

The complete mitochondrial genome of Camponotus concavus Kim & Kim, 1994 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

“…Gene order of C. concavus is identical to those of Camponotus atrox (Kim et al 2016) and only differs in the placement of tRNA-Ile from Polyrhachis dives (Liu et al 2017) in tribe Camponotini. The control region, presumably corresponding to the single largest non-coding AT-rich region (985 bp, A þ T 84.3%), is the third largest; control regions of C. atrox and Wasmannia auropunctata are 1402 bp and 987 bp, respectively (Kim et al 2016;Duan et al 2016).…”