Draft mitochondrial genomes of Hirudo medicinalis and Hirudo verbana (Annelida, Hirudinea)

Abstract

Here we present two incomplete mitochondrial genome sequences of Hirudo medicinalis and Hirudo verbana (Annelida, Hirudinea). The corresponding sequences are 14,729 and 14,604 base pairs in length. They contain all mitochondrial genes (13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNAs and two rRNAs) but lack the non-coding region. Nevertheless, the robust reconstruction of their phylogenetic relationships presented here reveals distinct separation of both leeches from other annelids and at the same time relatively high dissimilarity between each other.

Keywords: Hirudo medicinalis; Hirudo verbana; mitochondrial genome.

Figure 1.

The phylogenetic relationships of H. medicinalis and H. verbana (both shown in bold). The analysis was performed using Maximum Likelihood method based on the Tamura 3-parameter model (Tamura 1992) in MEGA7 (Kumar et al. 2012). Metaphire californica was used as an outgroup. The robustness of each node is represented by a bootstrap value obtained by 500 steps. The scale bar corresponds to a number of substitutions per site. Each NCBI accession number of the sequence used to construct the tree is shown next to corresponding taxa name.