Pundamilia nyererei (Perciformes, Cichlidae) is a member of Cichlid fishes that lives in the Great Lakes of East Africa. Fishes of the Cichlidae family can adapt spectacular trophic radiations and provide good potential examples of vertebrate adaptive radiations. Here, we firstly assembled the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of Pundamilia nyererei. The mitgenome was 16 761 bp in length, including 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes and 1 putative control region. Most of these protein-coding genes started with a traditional ATG codon except for COX1, which initiated with an infrequent start codon GTG instead, and terminated with the mitochondrial stop codon (TAA/AGG/AGA) or a single T base. The mitogenome structural organization is identical to other Cichlid fish. The overall GC content is 45.25%, which is lower than the AT content. According to these new determined mitogenome sequences and 10 other species under the same family or order, we have constructed the species phylogenetic tree to verify the accuracy of newly assembled mitogenome sequences. We accept that by taking the advantage of full mitogenome, we can address taxonomic issue and study the related evolutionary events. Our current data are going to provide important resources for the research of Cichlid fishes mitochondrial evolution and energy metabolism.
Keywords: Cichlid; Pundamilia nyererei; mitogenome.