Abstract:
The Cichlid fishes have played an important role in evolutionary biology, population studies
and aquaculture industry with East African species representing a model suited for studying
adaptive radiation and speciation for cichlid genome projects in which closely related genomes
are fast emerging presenting questions on phenotype–genotype relations. The complete
mitochondrial genomes presented here are for two closely related but eco-morphologically
distinct Lake Victoria basin cichlids, Oreochromis variabilis, an endangered native species and
Tilapia zilli, an invasive species, both of which are important economic fishes in local areas. The
complete mitochondrial genomes determined for O. variabilis and T. zilli are 16 626 and
16,619 bp, respectively. Both the mitogenomes contain 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNAs,
2 rRNAs and a non-coding control region, which are typical of vertebrate mitogenomes.
Phylogenetic analyses of the two species revealed that though both lie within family Cichlidae,
they are remotely related.
