COMPARISON OF CODON USAGE IN MITOCHONDRIAL GENOMES OF RHINOLOPHID AND HIPPOSIDERID BATS

COMPARISON OF CODON USAGE IN MITOCHONDRIAL GENOMES OF RHINOLOPHID AND HIPPOSIDERID BATS

DORIĆ, Semir
LUKIĆ BILELA, Lada

According to current phylogenetic hypotheses, the bats of the families Rhinolophidae and Hipposideridae are sister groups nested within the clade of Pteropodiformes. The Hipposideridae are family of bats commonly known as the Old World leaf-nose bats. While this family has long been considered as a rhinolophid subfamily Hipposiderinae, it is now more generally classified as its own family. The Hipposideridae contain 10 living genera and more than 70 species, mostly in the widespread genus Hipposideros. This study is an attempt to confirm a distinction between these two families by a codon usage comparison of a complete set of mitochondrial protein-coding genes from currently available mitochondrial (mt) genomes of rhinolophid and hiposiderid bats. The INCA 2.1 and GCUA 2.0 were used for the codon usage computing. Measure Independent of Length and Composition (MILC), was used to estimate the codon usage of 13 mt protein-coding genes from five species of genus Rhinolophus and one species of Hipposideros (while only four genes were available from H. larvatus). Large randomly generated sequence sets were used to test for dependence on (i) sequence length, (ii) overall amount of codon bias and (iii) codon bias discrepancy in the sequences. Our findings suggest no significant differences in codon usage bias, among analyzed rhinolophid species, by statistical estimation of absolute frequency values despite the changed MILC values for nd1 and nd3 from Hipposideros armiger. Keywords: MILC, MELP, bats, codon usage, codon frequencies

Article
PeerReviewed

ISSN 978-9958-834-36-3

International Burch University

2014-05-15

2451