De novo assembly of the mitochondrial genome of Ulva fasciata Delile (Ulvophyceae, Chlorophyta), a distromatic blade-forming green macroalga

Abstract

We present the 61 614 bp circular-mapping mitochondrial genome of Ulva fasciata. Fifty-eight genes were identified including 29 protein-coding genes, 27 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, and two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. Four ORFs from the Ulva sp. UNA00071828 mitogenome were conserved compared to the mitogenome of Ulva fasciata. The ∼10 000 bp size difference was mostly due to fewer introns found in U. fasciata mtDNA (4) as compared with the Ulva sp. UNA00071828 mtDNA (10). Introns were annotated in cox1 (3) and nad3 (1). The AT content was similar to Ulva sp. UNA00071828 mtDNA at 67.5%. A phylogenomic anaylsis of 28 chlorophytes and 17 protein-coding genes (14 115 bp alignment) showed that U. fasciata clusters closely with other members of the Ulvophyceae (Ulva sp. UNA00071828, Pseudendoclonium akinetum, and Oltmannsiellopsis viridis). This analysis did not recover a monophyletic Ulvophyceae, however, the Trebouxiophyceae and Chlorophyceae were supported as monophyletic groups.

• Green algae
• marine
• mitochondrion
• Ulva
• Ulvaceae
• Ulvales

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eric Antoniou for performing the MiSeq run at Cold Spring Harbor, and Frederik Leliaert, Ana Tronholm, and Daryl W. Lam for helping develop a pipeline for assembling and annotating genomes in the PhycoLab (http://phycolab.ua.edu). The authors would also like to thank David Ward and Maya Allen for field and technical assistance.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest and are responsible for the content and writing of this paper. Funds for this investigation were provided by The National Science Foundation through Assembling The Tree of Life for Green Algae GRAToL (DEB 1036495), and the Graduate School and the Department of Biological Sciences at The University of Alabama.