The complete mitochondrial genome of Eurasian Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus (Accipitriformes: Accipitridae)

Abstract The mitogenome of the Accipiter nisus is a circular module of 18,352 bp, which consists of 39 genes, containing 2 rRNA genes (12S rRNA and 16S rRNA), 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, and two non-coding regions (control region and pseudo control region). The mitogenome of A. nisus is composed of 31.3% A, 25.5% T, 30.4% C, 12.8% G, and 76.3% AT. The phylogenetic analysis revealed that A. nisus individuals was well grouped in Accipitridae and more closely related to genus Circus than other Accpiter species

The Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) is a small-sized raptor species that hunt small and medium-sized passerines in the forest environment (Rytk€ onen et al. 1998;Lehikoinen et al. 2010;Hussain et al. 2016). It is distributed in an extremely large range encompassing most of Europe and Asia, and is well adapted to subtropical and temperate areas (Herv ıas et al. 2017). This species is designated as secondgrade endangered species of wild fauna and flora in South Korea (National Institute of Biological Resources 2019).
Muscle tissues of A. nisus were collected from the roadkilled carcass at Inje-gun, Gangwon-do (38 07 0 18.4 N 00 , 128 10 0 10.2ʺE). A Voucher specimen (KNUWB-04) was deposited in the Wildlife and Fish Conservation Center of the Institute of Forest Science, Kangwon National University. DNeasy Blood & Tissue Kit (Qiagen, Valencia, CA, USA) was used for DNA extraction according to the manufacturer's instruction. A previously published mitogenome (KM360148) of A. nisus (Zhang et al. 2016) was used as a reference for PCR primers and Geneious prime (Kearse et al. 2012) was used for gene annotation and aligned with that of the other 13 Accipitridae species using Clustal W implemented in Geneious Prime (Auckland, New Zealand). The phylogenetic tree was constructed by MEGA-X (Kumar et al. 2018) using the Maximum likelihood (ML) based on the mtREV with frequencies (þF) with gamma distributed with invariant sites (G þ I) was selected as the best model of evolution (Jones et al. 1992;Kumar et al. 2018). The Eurasian magpie pica pica (ND015200) was used as an outgroup.
The complete mitogenome of A. nisus (GenBank accession no. MN929010) was 18,352 bp in length and contained two ribosomal RNAs (12S rRNA and 16S rRNA), 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNAs (tRNAs), and two non-coding regions (control region and the pseudo control region).
The base composition for the mitogenome sequence is AT-biased, with nucleotide composition of 31.3% A, 25.5% T, 30.4% C, 12.8% G and 76.3% AT. Length of the two rRNA genes (12 s rRNA and 16 s rRNA) were 971 bp (52.1% A þ T) and 1602bp (53.4% A þ T), respectively.
Mitochondrial genome of A. nisus contains two non-coding regions (D-loop, pseudo control region). D-loop is 2,033 bp in length, located between tRNA Thu and tRNA Pro . The Pseudo control region is 760 bp in length, located between tRNA Glu and tRNA Phe .
In comparison with the previously published mitogenome of the A. nisus (KM360148), which has a total size of 18,647 bp, 99.8% sequence similarity was found in the other regions except for D-loop (96.7%) and pseudo control region (99.7%) The phylogenetic analysis revealed that A. nisus is well placed within the tribe Accipitridae (Figure 1), which forms a sister clade to Chinese A. nisus (KM360148). It is analyzed that our sample is more closely related to the genus Circus (KT438620, KU237286) than other Accpiter species. Earlier datasets have shown genus Circus to be sister to the genus Accpiter (Barrowclough, 2014), but Oatley et al. (2015) suggest that have no strong support in which lineages are the exact sister-group to the Circus clade.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GenBank of NCBI at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, reference number MN929010. Figure 1. The intraspecific phylogeny of Accipiter nisus based on mitogenome sequences. The phylogenetic tree was generated using the maximum likelihood based on mtREV with frequencies (þF) with gamma distributed with invariant sites (G þ I). The robustness of the tree was tested with 2000 bootstraps. The numbers on the branches indicate bootstrap values.