Mitochondrial genomes of Anopheles arabiensis, An. gambiae and An. coluzzii show no clear species division

Here we report the complete mitochondrial sequences of 70 individual field collected mosquito specimens from throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. We generated this dataset to identify species specific markers for the followingAnophelesspecies and chromosomal forms:An. arabiensis,An. coluzzii(TheForestandMoptichromosomal forms) andAn. gambiae(TheBamakoandSavannahchromosomal forms). The raw Illumina sequencing reads were mapped to the NC_002084 reference mitogenome sequence. A total of 783 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected on the mitochondrial genome, of which 460 are singletons (58.7%). None of these SNPs are suitable as molecular markers to distinguish amongAn. arabiensis,An. coluzziiandAn. gambiaeor any of the chromosomal forms. The lack of species or chromosomal form specific markers is also reflected in the constructed phylogenetic tree, which shows no clear division among the operational taxonomic units considered here.