Graduate Student Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
The mitochondrial genome is shown to have stable gene order relative to the nuclear genome in most eukaryotic organisms. Thrips, Thysanoptera (Paraneoptera), are an enigmatic order of minute insects that display extensive gene rearrangement, control region duplications and tRNA mutations across the entire order. These rearrangements have implications for the assumptions of evolutionary rates in CO1 barcoding, mitochondrial dynamics & replication, mitogenome assembly pipelines, and phylogenetics. We discuss these implications and recommend considerations for the use of barcodes and future mitochondrial research in thysanoptera.
