The complete mitochondrial genome of the black dead leaf butterfly Doleschallia melana (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)

Abstract

The black dead leaf butterfly Doleschallia melana (Staudinger, 1886) (Nymphalidae) is a leaf mimic endemic to Indonesia. Genome skimming by Illumina sequencing enabled the assembly of a complete 15,269 bp circular mitogenome from D. melana consisting of 80.0% AT nucleotides, 22 tRNAs, 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNAs and a control region in the typical butterfly gene order. Doleschallia melana COX1 features an atypical CGA start codon while ATP6, COX1, COX2, ND1, ND2, ND4, and ND5 exhibit incomplete stop codons. Phylogenetic reconstruction places D. melana as the sister taxon to the clade containing the tribes Kallimini, Nymphalini and Junoniini.

Keywords:

• Illumina sequencing
• mitogenomics
• Lepidoptera
• Nymphalidae
• phylogeny

Acknowledgements

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

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest and are solely responsible for this paper.

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 MT704829 and MT704832.

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from NSERC under Grants [RGPIN386337-2011 and RGPIN-2016-06012] and from the University of Manitoba under the University Research Grants Program.