Searching for doubly uniparental inheritance of mtDNA in the apple snail Pomacea diffusa.

Doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is an exceptional mode of mtDNA transmission, restricted so far to the class of bivalves. We searched for DUI outside bivalves using the apple snail Pomacea diffusa. It was an appropriate candidate to search for DUI for three reasons; it belongs to gastropods, which is the closest sister group to bivalves, it is gonochoristic and it has a strong sex bias in the progeny of different female individuals. These phenomena (gonochorism and sex-biased progeny) are also found in species with DUI. We searched for heteroplasmy in males and for high sequence divergence among mtDNA sequences obtained from male and female gonads. All sequences examined were identical. These data suggest that the mtDNA in P. diffusa is maternally transmitted and DUI remains an exclusive characteristic of bivalves.