Vespa soror, mitochondrial genome

Animal mitogenomes are often portrayed as compact and conservative, and our hybrid Illumina and Oxford Nanopore assembly of the southern giant hornet (Vespa soror) resolved a 22,046 bp circular mitogenome with the expected gene complement and conserved order. Phylogenetic analyses of the 13 protein-coding genes recovered V. soror in its expected position within Vespa, clustering with Vespa mandarinia. Against this canonical backdrop, we have identified two large repeat systems. The control region carried six long tandem repeats, mirroring expansions in the related hornets. More strikingly, the conserved trnY/trnI/trnM/trnQ block contained a head-to-tail array of three 209-bp cassettes, each encoding a functional trnM, yielding four trnM genes in total, which is unique among Vespa.