Abstract

The red tomato spider mite, Tetranychus evansi Baker & Pritchard, is a newly emerged and globally invasive pest of solanaceous plants. In this study, the complete mitochondrial genome of T. evansi was sequenced using Illumina Hiseq technology. The complete mitochondrial genome of T. evansi is a typical circular DNA with a length of 13,064 bp, which contains 37 genes arranged in consistent with the typical metazoan mitochondrial genomes. Highly truncated mitochondrial tRNAs were observed, with 18 of the 22 tRNAs appearing to lack the D- or T- arms or both. A preliminary phylogenic analysis showed that mitochondrial genome can significantly improve the reliability of phylogenetic inference relative to short sequences, as indicated by the elevated bootstrap values. This mitochondrial genome provides a valuable source for the future phylogenetic analyses and helps clear the introduction origins of the Chinese T. evansi populations.