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MBE Advance Access published online on January 4, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn003
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Letter

Bird mitochondrial gene order: insight from three warbler mitochondrial genomes

Tiratha Raj Singh{dagger},*, Ophir Shneor* and Dorothée Huchon*

* Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
{dagger} Department of Mathematics and Bioinformatics, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Deemed Universtity, Bhopal 462007, India

E-mail: huchond{at}post.tau.ac.il

Received for publication October 30, 2007. Revision received December 27, 2007. Accepted for publication December 27, 2007.

Two main gene orders exist in birds: the ancestral gene order and the remnant control-region 2 gene order. These gene orders differ by the presence of one or two copies of the control region, respectively. Among songbirds, oscines were thought to follow the ancestral gene order, with the exception of the lyrebird and Phylloscopus warblers. Here, we determined the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of three non Phylloscopus warblers species, and found that the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) and the reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) have two almost identical copies of the control region, while the eastern orphean warbler (S. crassirostris) follows the remnant control-region 2 gene order. Our results contradict previous studies suggesting that Acrocephalus and most sylvioid warblers exhibit the ancestral gene order. We were able to trace this contradiction to a misidentification of gene order from PCR length determination. We thus suggest that passerine gene order evolution needs to be revised.

Key Words: Sylvioidea, Sylvia, Acrocephalus, complete mitochondrial genome • control region, concerted evolution, gene duplication


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