MITOSCISSOR: A Useful Tool for Auto-Assembly of Mitogenomic Datasets in the Evolutionary Analysis of Fishes

As a result of the development of rapid and efficient sequencing technologies, complete sequences of numerous mitochondrial genomes are now available. Mitochondrial genomes have been widely used to evaluate relationships between species in several fields, including evolutionary and population genetics, as well as in forensic identification and in the study of mitochondrial diseases in humans. However, the creation of mitochondrial genomes is extremely time consuming. In this paper, we present a new tool, MITOSCISSOR, which is a rapid method for parsing and formatting dozens of complete mitochondrial genome sequences. With the aid of MITOSCISSOR, complete mitochondrial genome sequences of 103 species from Tetraodontiformes (a difficult-to-classify order of fish) were easily parsed and formatted. It typically takes several days to produce similar results when relying upon manual editing. This tool could open the .gb file of Genbank directly and help us to use existing mitogenomic data. In the present study, we established the first clear and robust molecular phylogeny of 103 tetraodontiform fishes, a goal that has long eluded ichthyologists. MITOSCISSOR greatly increases the efficiency with which DNA data files can be parsed and annotated, and thus has the potential to greatly facilitate evolutionary analysis using mitogenomic data. This software is freely available for noncommercial users at http://www.filedropper.com/mitoscissor.