The mitochondrial genome of a Texas outbreak strain of the cattle tick, Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus, derived from whole genome sequencing Pacific Biosciences and Illumina reads

Abstract

The cattle fever tick, Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus is one of the most significant medical veterinary pests in the world, vectoring several serious livestock diseases negatively impacting agricultural economies of tropical and subtropical countries around the world. In our study, we assembled the complete R. microplus mitochondrial genome from Illumina and Pac Bio sequencing reads obtained from the ongoing R. microplus (Deutsch strain from Texas, USA) genome sequencing project. We compared the Deutsch strain mitogenome to the mitogenome from a Brazilian R. microplus and from an Australian cattle tick that has recently been taxonomically designated as Rhipicephalus australis after previously being considered R. microplus. The sequence divergence of the Texas and Australia ticks is much higher than the divergence between the Texas and Brazil ticks. This is consistent with the idea that the Australian ticks are distinct from the R. microplus of the Americas.

Keywords: Cattle tick; Mitochondrial genome; Pac Bio.