RESEARCH ARTICLE Comparative Mitogenomics of the Assassin Bug Genus Peirates (Hemiptera: Reduviidae: Peiratinae) Reveal Conserved Mitochondrial Genome Organization of P. atromaculatus,

In this study, we sequenced four new mitochondrial genomes and presented comparative mitogenomic analyses of five species in the genus Peirates (Hemiptera: Reduviidae). Mito-chondrial genomes of these five assassin bugs had a typical set of 37 genes and retained the ancestral gene arrangement of insects. The A+T content, AT- and GC-skews were simi-lar to the common base composition biases of insect mtDNA. Genomic size ranges from 15,702 bp to 16,314 bp and most of the size variation was due to length and copy number of the repeat unit in the putative control region. All of the control region sequences included large tandem repeats present in two or more copies. Our result revealed similarity in mito-chondrial genomes of P. atromaculatus, P. fulvescens and P. turpis, as well as the highly conserved genomic-level characteristics of these three species, e.g., the same start and stop codons of protein-coding genes, conserved secondary structure of tRNAs, identical lo-cation and length of non-coding and overlapping regions, and conservation of structural ele-ments and tandem repeat unit in control region. Phylogenetic analyses also supported a close relationship between P. atromaculatus, P. fulvescens and P. turpis, which might be re-cently diverged species. The present study indicates that mitochondrial genome has impor-tant implications on phylogenetics, population genetics and speciation in the genus Peirates