The mitochondrial genome of the lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum)

Williams-Newkirk, Amanda Jo; Burroughs, Mark; Changayil, Shankar; Dasch, Gregory A.

doi:10.1016/j.ttbdis.2015.07.006

Cited by 31 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Tick-Boxes are two to three degenerate 17 bp-long motifs ( ) discovered in tick mitogenomes, which are believed to be post-transcriptional regulatory elements, and might also have been involved in genome rearrangements [ 29 ]. Although the third box is not present in all metastriate ticks [ 3 , 29 ], all three boxes were found in the two studied mitogenomes ( Table 1 ) exactly in the positions described before [ 29 ]. The six motifs were highly conserved; only two different sequences were found, differing by only a mutation: (both Tick-Boxes-1 and Haa Tick-Box-2) and (both Tick-Boxes-3 and Hak Tick-Box-2).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Generally, gene sizes are highly conserved among the available Ixodidae mitogenomes, with most genes exhibiting a size-window smaller than 10 bp; exceptions are only nad2 and nad5 with approximately 30 bp size-windows ( S1 File B worksheet). Regarding the two studied mitogenomes, the only outlier is nad5 gene (1641 bp), which is smaller than in other available orthologs, with only the Amblyomma americanum [ 3 ] ortholog exhibiting a similar size (1642 bp). Both studied mitogenomes used identical start and termination codons.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The mean AT and GC skews are -0.027 and -0.144 respectively. All these characteristics are standard for ticks ( S1 File ) [ 3 , 5 , 9 , 20 ]. The A+T content (78.1% Haa, 78.2% Hak) is also average for this group of animals: metastriate ticks have the A+T content between 75 and 80%, whereas soft ticks have a somewhat lower A+T content of 70–75% [ 3 , 5 , 9 , 20 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The start codons used were (6), (4), and (3), whereas the termination codons were (9), (3) and (1), all of which are standard for ticks [ 9 , 20 ]. Intriguingly, atp8 used , which is non-standard for this group of animals; it was reported only in Amblyomma americanum [ 3 ] and Ixodes hexagonus [ 7 ] among the available Ixodidae mitogenomes, whereas the rest of the species use , or ( S1 File , worksheet B). As observed in other ticks, two -rich or non-coding regions were found (CR1 and CR2, Table 1 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) carry a large amount of data, which makes them capable of providing much higher resolution than traditionally used morphological and single-gene molecular markers, and therefore mitochondrial phylogenomics is increasingly used to address controversial phylogenetic relationships [ 16 – 18 ]. Mitochondrial phylogenomics has also been used to study the phylogeny of ticks [ 3 , 19 – 21 ], but its applicability remains hampered by the unavailability of mitogenomes for many large taxonomic categories, including the entire Hyalomma genus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sequencing of complete mitochondrial genomes confirms synonymization of Hyalomma asiaticum asiaticum and kozlovi, and advances phylogenetic hypotheses for the Ixodidae

Liu

Kuermanali

et al. 2018

PLoS ONE

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Phylogeny of hard ticks (Ixodidae) remains unresolved. Mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) are increasingly used to resolve phylogenetic controversies, but remain unavailable for the entire large Hyalomma genus. Hyalomma asiaticum is a parasitic tick distributed throughout the Asia. As a result of great morphological variability, two subspecies have been recognised historically; until a morphological data-based synonymization was proposed. However, this hypothesis was never tested using molecular data. Therefore, objectives of this study were to: 1. sequence the first Hyalomma mitogenome; 2. scrutinise the proposed synonymization using molecular data, i.e. complete mitogenomes of both subspecies: H. a. asiaticum and kozlovi; 3. conduct phylogenomic and comparative analyses of all available Ixodidae mitogenomes. Results corroborate the proposed synonymization: the two mitogenomes are almost identical (99.6%). Genomic features of both mitogenomes are standard for Metastriata; which includes the presence of two control regions and all three "Tick-Box" motifs. Gene order and strand distribution are perfectly conserved for the entire Metastriata group. Suspecting compositional biases, we conducted phylogenetic analyses (29 almost complete mitogenomes) using homogeneous and heterogeneous (CAT) models of substitution. The results were congruent, apart from the deep-level topology of prostriate ticks (Ixodes): the homogeneous model produced a monophyletic Ixodes, but the CAT model produced a paraphyletic Ixodes (and thereby Prostriata), divided into Australasian and non-Australasian clades. This topology implies that all metastriate ticks have evolved from the ancestor of the non-Australian branch of prostriate ticks. Metastriata was divided into three clades: 1. Amblyomminae and Rhipicephalinae (Rhipicephalus, Hyalomma, Dermacentor); 2. Haemaphysalinae and Bothriocrotoninae, plus Amblyomma sphenodonti; 3. Amblyomma elaphense, basal to all Metastriata. We conclude that mitogenomes have the potential to resolve the long-standing debate about the evolutionary history of ticks, but heterogeneous evolutionary models should be used to alleviate the effects of compositional heterogeneity on deep-level relationships.

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