The complete mitochondrial genome of the Jackson’s leaf butterfly Mallika jacksoni (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)

Abstract

The Jackson’s leaf butterfly Mallika jacksoni (Sharpe 1896), is a leaf-mimicking species from tropical East Africa. Genome skimming by Illumina sequencing permitted the assembly of the complete circular M. jacksoni 15,183 bp mitogenome. It consists of 79.4% AT nucleotides, 22 tRNAs, 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNAs, and a control region in the typical butterfly gene order. Mallika jacksoni COX1 has a CGA start codon while ATP6, COX1, COX2, ND3, ND4, and ND5 exhibit partial stop codons completed by 3′-A residues added to the mRNA. Phylogenetic reconstruction places M. jacksoni as sister to Kallima within nymphalid tribe Kallimini.

Keywords:

• Illumina sequencing
• mitogenomics
• Lepidoptera
• Nymphalidae
• Kallimini

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 MT704828 and MT704831.

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.