Hopeful monsters: Unintended sequencing of famously malformed mite mitochondrial tRNAs reveals widespread expression and processing of sense-antisense pairs

While performing mitochondrial isolations and recently developed tRNA-seq methods (AlkB treatment and YAMAT-Seq) in plant tissue, we inadvertently sequenced the mitochondrial tRNAs from a common plant pest, the acariform mite Tetranychus urticae, to a high enough coverage to detect all previously annotated T. urticae tRNA regions. The results not only confirm expression, CCA-tailing and post-transcriptional base modification of these highly divergent tRNAs, but also revealed paired sense and antisense expression of multiple T. urticae mitochondrial tRNAs. Overall design: Analysis of full-length tRNA reads from the mitochondria of Tetranychus urticae.