ESTs matching to the rrnL gene, and rrnL ESTs with a polyA stretch corresponding to the polyA tail of the mature rrnL transcript.

aESTs publicly available at 20 Feb, 2012.bESTs with a terminal polyA stretch >10 bp, mapping to the end of rrnL. Polyadenylated ESTs mapping well inside the rrnL gene have not been considered, as they are mostly cDNA artefacts originated from the annealing of the oligo-dT primer to an A-rich inner gene region during the cDNA first strand synthesis.caccession number of the mt genomic sequence, if available. “Congeneric” means that only the sequence of a congeneric species is available, as reported in Table S1.