The complete mitochondrial genome of the confused flour beetle Tribolium confusum (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)

Flour beetles of the genus Tribolium are economically important as destructive cosmopolitan pests of stored flour, corn, peanuts, and other dried agricultural products. The confused flour beetle Tribolium confusum Jacquelin du Val (1868) is one of the most important pest species of flour beetle. Here we sequenced and characterized the complete mitochondrial genome of T. confusum, the entire sequence is 15,813 bp in size with 72.8% AT content. It consists of 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNA (tRNA), 2 ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes and one major non-coding AT-rich region. The mitogenome of T. confusum exhibits a gene arrangement and content identical to the most common type in insects. All PCGs are start with a typical ATN initiation codon, except for the cox1, which use AAC as its start codon instead of ATN. Ten genes use standard complete termination codon (six TAA, three TAG), whereas the cox2, cox3, nad4 and nad5 genes end with single T. Except for trnS1 ((AGN)), all tRNA genes display typical secondary cloverleaf structures as those of other insects. The sizes of the large and small ribosomal RNA genes are 1277 and 773 bp, respectively. The AT content of the AT-rich region is 79.5%. The 5 bp conserved motif TACTA was found in the intergenic region between trnS2 ((UCN)) and nad1.