Mitogenomics of the Uropodina

Uropodina is one of the most diverse lineages in Parasitiformes with more than 2000 species described (Wisniewski, 1998; Gwiazdowicz et al., 2023). Current classification of the group is unstable but advances in molecular techniques and phylogenomic analysis offer solutions. For instance, high-throughput sequencing technology has made the mitochondrial genome accessible. For uropodines there are only 7 publicly available mitogenomes representing 5 families (Trachytidae, Discourellidae, Dinychidae, Trematuridae and Urodinychidae), mostly from Europe (Arribas et al., 2019). We conducted sampling of a wider geographic and taxonomic coverage and were able to process mitogenome assemblies for 63 species using the software GetOrganelle (Jin et al., 2020). For downstream analysis we only included assemblies with at least 10,000 bp ending up with 17 complete and 14 partial mitogenomes. Included genome size ranged from 10,096bp up to the longest assembly with 17,305bp. Genomes were annotated using Mitos2 (Bernt et al., 2013) and selected protein coding genes were extracted and aligned for use in phylogenetic analysis. We used likelihood, Bayesian methods to infer phylogenetic trees. The increase in the available mitogenomes of Uropodina allows for mitochondrial phylogenomic analysis of the group while also increasing taxon sampling for future analysis within Mesostigmata, Parasitiformes and Acari. Preliminary results also suggest mitochondrial gene order in Uropodina have gone through multiple rearrangement, which have been observed in other mites (Li et al., 2019; Yuan et al., 2023).