ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.

Sec. Marine Evolutionary Biology, Biogeography and Species Diversity

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1600021

Three new sequences of Ostrea stentina and the evolution of the mitogenome of the Ostreinae clams (Ostreidae, Bivalvia)

Provisionally accepted
Daniele CorrainDaniele Corrain1Rafaella FranchRafaella Franch1Massimiliano BabbucciMassimiliano Babbucci1Davide TagliapietraDavide Tagliapietra2Irene GuarneriIrene Guarneri2Marco SigoviniMarco Sigovini2Valentina BonfattiValentina Bonfatti1Tomaso PatarnelloTomaso Patarnello1Enrico NegrisoloEnrico Negrisolo1*
  • 1Dipartimento di Biomedica Comparata e Alimentazione, Università di Padova, Legnaro, Italy
  • 2Institute of Marine Sciences (CNR-ISMAR), National Research Council of Italy, Venice, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

Oysters are a group of bivalves forming the family Ostreidae. The identification of oysters at species level is sometimes difficult. The use of molecular data has drastically improved the reliability of species identification and our understanding of their phylogenetic relationships. Markers obtained from mitochondrial genome have played and continue to play a key role in this process. Complete mitogenomes are still unavailable for many oyster species. We sequenced three complete mitogenomes of the dwarf oyster Ostrea stentina. We performed a comparative and evolutionary mitogenomic study of the new sequences combined with all available ones for the Ostreinae. The mitogenome of O. stentina exhibited the standard gene order of Ostreinae, which is different from those observed in other subfamilies of Ostreidae. The study of these mitogenomic arrangements identified gene blocks that were present in the mitogenome of the last common ancestor of the Ostreidae. The comparative analysis allowed identifying peculiar features of the mitogenomes of Ostreinae as well as of their protein coding genes, tRNAs genes, rRNA genes, and control regions.The genus Ostrea resulted polyphyletic in the mito-phylogenomic analysis. The stems and loops of several tRNAs contained short DNA motifs useful to identify single species/groups of species. Short sequences, playing the role of molecular signatures characterizing a single taxon or a group of species, were identified also in the intergenic spacers. The identification of these taxonomic and phylogenetic markers reinforces the crucial role of mitogenomes in elucidating the evolutionary history of oysters.

Keywords: Ostrea stentina, Ostreinae, Mitogenome, phylogenetics, Mitochondrial genomics, Molecular signatures

Received: 25 Mar 2025; Accepted: 19 May 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Corrain, Franch, Babbucci, Tagliapietra, Guarneri, Sigovini, Bonfatti, Patarnello and Negrisolo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Enrico Negrisolo, Dipartimento di Biomedica Comparata e Alimentazione, Università di Padova, Legnaro, Italy

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material