Characteristics of the complete mitochondrial genome of (Neuroptera, Ascalaphidae) and its phylogenetic implications.

The owlflies (Family Ascalaphidae) belong to the Neuroptera but are often mistaken as dragonflies because of morphological characters. To date, only three mitochondrial genomes of Ascalaphidae, namely ; ; , are published in GenBank, meaning that they are greatly under-represented in comparison with the 430 described species reported in this family. In this study, we sequenced and described the complete mitochondrial genome of (Neuroptera, Ascalaphidae). The total length of the mitogenome was 15,911 bp, which is the longest known to date among the available family members of Ascalaphidae. However, the size of each gene was similar to the other three Ascalaphidae species. The mitogenome included a transposition of tRNA and tRNA genes and formed an unusual gene arrangement tRNA-tRNA-tRNA (CWY). It is likely that the transposition occurred by a duplication of both genes followed by random loss of partial duplicated genes. The nucleotide composition of the mitogenome was as follows: = 41.0%, = 33.8%, = 15.5%, = 9.7%. Both Bayesian inference and ML analyses strongly supported as a sister clade to ( + ), and indicated that Ascalaphidae is not monophyletic.