Whole mitogenome variation in domestic cats discovered via nanopore sequencing

Abstract

Domestic cats are popular household pets, whose shed and transferred hairs can provide important forensic evidence in crime scenes. Traditionally, a 402 bp mitochondrial DNA segment is Sanger-sequenced and compared to a population database; however, >60% of cats have one of four common haplotypes, limiting utility. To identify additional variation, we used nanopore technology to sequence the whole 17 kb mitogenomes of 93 cat blood samples in two overlapping ~9 kb amplicons, allowing us both to avoid a prominent nuclear mitochondrial insertion sequence and to distinguish 74 different haplotypes. We also used nanopore sequencing of 60 overlapping short amplicons to generate whole mitogenome sequences from cat hairs.