Meeting Abstract
There is much evolutionary and biological interest in the processes that shaped Antarctic notothenioid fish’s adaptations via molecular changes. We investigated the evolutionary pathways that produced the diversity of gene orders observed in the mitochondrial genomes (mtDNAs) of these organisms. Antarctic notothenioids exhibit translocations of nad6 and trnE genes in different positions with respect to the standard vertebrate gene order. We sequenced the mtDNAs of 14 Antarctic notothenioids and 1 species with sub-Antarctic distribution. We analysed a big dataset including notothenioid mtDNAs already available in public databases and a broad set of outgroups, encompassing several mtDNAs of other Perciform species. A molecular phylogenetic analysis, based on Bayesian and maximum-likelihood methods, provided a strongly supported notothenioid tree used to map the evolution of gene order in these peculiar fishes. The analysis was completed with the study of the molecular evolution of single mitochondrial genes. In a modern era, when sequencing of large genomes has become a state-of-the-art, this study demonstrates that small compact mitochondrial genomes still embed a large amount of information that advanced analytical approaches can bring to light.
