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Abstract
The American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos (Passeriformes, Corvidae), is a large passerine bird species closely related to the raven. Herein, we first published the complete mitochondrial genome of American crows. The mitogenome was 16,917 bp long, and composed of 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, two rRNA genes, and one putative control region. Most protein-coding genes started with a traditional ATG codon except for COI, which initiated with an infrequent start codon GTG instead, and terminated with the mitochondria stop codon (TAA/AGG/AGA) or a single T base. The mitogenome structural organization is identical to that of the other corvus species and related genera. The overall GC content is 44.25% which is lower than AT. Using the 12 protein-coding genes of Corvus brachyrhynchos in this study, together with 10 other closely species, we constructed the species phylogenetic tree to verify the accuracy and utility of new determined mitogenome sequences. We expect that using the full mitogenome to address taxonomic issues and study the related evolution events. Moreover, this is the first report of bird mitogenomes after 48 avian species genome project achievements released in December 2014.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank BGI for generating the sequencing data of the American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) used in this work. The authors also thank Dr. Guojie Zhang, who is the chief scientist of B10K project, for giving our selfless help. Special thanks to anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on the manuscript.
Declaration of interest
The authors have declared that no conflict of interest exists. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.