The complete mitochondrial genome of an old world fruit bat Sphaerias blanfordi (Pteropodidae)

Abstract

Sphaerias blanfordi Thomas is the single species of the genus Sphaerias Thomas in the family Pteropodidae. To better determine its phylogenetic location with respect to the related Pteropodidae species, the complete mitochondrial genome of S. blanfordi was sequenced. The whole genome is 16,926 bp in length. The overall GC content of the whole genome is 40.7%. Further, maximum-likelihood phylogenetic analyse was conducted using 11 complete mitochondrial genomes of the Pteropodidae, which support close relationship between S. blanfordi and Cynopterus brachyotis or C. sphinx.

Keywords:

• Sphaerias blanfordi
• mitochondrial genome
• phylogenetic analysis

Sphaerias blanfordi Thomas, a fruit-eating bat specie that distributed from southern Tibet to northern India and Bhutan, was assigned to the genus Sphaerias in the family Pteropodidae (Lekagul and McNeely 1977; Almeida et al. 2011). For a better understanding of the relationships of S. blanfordi and other Pteropodidae species, it is necessary to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree based on high-throughput sequencing approaches.

Fresh muscle tissues of S. blanfordi in Lujiangba County (Yunnan, China; Long. 98.8239 E, Lat. 25.0949 N, 808.28 m) were sampled for DNA extraction. The voucher was deposited at the Ecology & Evolution of Plant-Animal interaction Research Group of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (Accession Number: XTBG-EEPAI-YXK101). The whole mitochondrial genome was sequenced following Yoon et al. (2016), and their primer pairs were used to perform long-range PCR for next-generation sequencing. The contigs were aligned using the publicly available mitochondrial genome of Cynopterus brachyotis (GenBank accession number KM659865) (Yoon et al. 2016) and annotated in Geneious 4.8.

The mitochondrial genome of S. blanfordi (XTBG-YXK-01), with a length of 16,926 bp was 225 bp and 41 bp larger than that of C. brachyotis (16,701 bp, KM659865) and C. sphinx (16,895 bp, KF750629). The mitogenome consists of 13 protein-coding genes, two rRNA (12S and 16S rRNA) genes, 22 tRNA genes, a replication origin region (OL), and a noncoding control region (D-loop). The OL region (35 bp) was located between tRNAAsn and tRNACys genes. The D-loop region (1485 bp) is located between tRNAPro and tRNAPhe.

Furthermore, based on 10 published mitochondrial genome sequences, we reconstructed a phylogenetic tree (Figure 1) to confirm the evolutionary relationship between S. blanfordi and other species with published mitochondrial in Pteropodidae, with Hipposideros armiger as outgroup. Maximum-likelihood (ML) phylogenetic analyses were performed base on GTR + F + I model in the iqtree version 1.6.7 program with 1000 bootstrap replicates (Lam-Tung et al. 2015). The ML phylogenetic tree with 69–100% bootstrap values at each node supported that Pteropodidae species grouped into two clades and that S. blanfordi and C. brachyotis were located in the same clade.

Figure 1. The ML phylogenetic tree for S. blanfordi based on other 10 species (1 in Hipposideros, 4 in Pteronntus, 2 in Cynopterus, 1 in Epomophorus, and 2 in Rousettus) mitochondrial genomes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The mitochondrial data of the S. blanfordi will be submitted to National center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Accession number is XTBG-YXK-01.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.