The mitochondrial genome of Cavia aperea

Azizia Wahedi; Anja Günther; Alexandra Weyrich; Neal Sondheimer

doi:10.1080/23802359.2020.1768918

The mitochondrial genome of Cavia aperea

Mitochondrial DNA B Resour. 2020 May 22;5(3):2147-2148. doi: 10.1080/23802359.2020.1768918.

Authors

Azizia Wahedi^{1

2}, Anja Günther³, Alexandra Weyrich⁴, Neal Sondheimer^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Program in Genetics and Genome Biology, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
² The Department of Paediatrics, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
³ Max Planck Research Group Behavioural Ecology of Individual Differences, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany.
⁴ Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), Berlin, Germany.

Abstract

Cavia aperea is a wild guinea pig found throughout South America. The previously published mitochondrial sequence for C. aperea was highly divergent from the C. porcellus sequence and contained stop codons within open reading frames. Here we resequenced the mitochondrial genomes of C. aperea and C. porcellus. Both sequences reflect gene organization typical for mammalian mitochondrial DNA. Our C. aperea mtDNA sequence shows that all of the open reading frames are intact, but confirms the strikingly low level of sequence identity (92.7%) with the closely related C. porcellus mtDNA.

Keywords: guinea pig; mtDNA.