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Mitogenome Announcement

The complete mitochondrial genome and phylogenetic analysis of the European map butterfly Araschnia levana (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)

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Pages 3246-3248 | Received 23 Jul 2020, Accepted 07 Aug 2020, Published online: 01 Sep 2020
 

Abstract

The European map butterfly Araschnia levana (Linnaeus, 1758) is a species showing extreme seasonal polyphenism. The complete 15,207 bp circular A. levana mitogenome consisting of 81.6% AT nucleotides, was assembled by Illumina genome skimming. It includes 22 tRNAs, 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNAs, and a control region in the typical butterfly gene order. Araschnia levana COX1 features an atypical CGA start codon and ATP6, COX1, COX2, ND1, ND3, and ND4 have incomplete stop codons completed by 3′A residues added to the mRNA. Phylogenetic reconstruction places A. levana as a basal lineage within tribe Nymphalini, consistent with previous phylogenetic hypotheses.

Acknowledgements

We thank Rayna Hamilton and Josephine Payment for their constructive criticism on this manuscript and Genome Quebec for assistance with library preparation and sequencing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GenBank of NCBI at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, reference numbers MT712075 and MT750296.

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from NSERC under Grants [RGPIN386337-2011 and RGPIN-2016-06012].