Rodríguez Pena, ElbaVerísimo Amor, PatriciaFernández, LuisGonzález-Tizón, Ana M.Bárcena Debén, CovadongaMartínez-Lage, Andrés2024-10-222024-10-222020-03-19Rodríguez-Pena E, Verísimo P, Fernández L, González-Tizón A, Bárcena C, Martínez-Lage A (2020) High incidence of heteroplasmy in the mtDNA of a natural population of the spider crab Maja brachydactyla. PLoS ONE 15(3): e0230243. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.02302431932-6203http://hdl.handle.net/2183/39727[Abstract]: Mitochondria are mostly inherited by maternal via, that is, only mitochondria from eggs are retained in the embryos. However, this general assumption of uniparentally transmitted, homoplasmic and non-recombining mitochondrial genomes is becoming more and more controversial. The presence of different sequences of mtDNA within a cell or individual, known as heteroplasmy, is increasingly reported in several taxon of animals, such as molluscs, arthropods and vertebrates. In this work, a considerable frequency of heteroplasmy were detected in the COI and 16S genes of the spider crab Maja brachydactyla, possibly associated to hybridisation with the congeneric species Maja squinado. This finding is a fact to keep in mind before addressing molecular analyses based on mitochondrial markers, since the assumption of maternal inheritance could lead to erroneous results. As M. brachydactyla is a commercial species, heteroplasmy is an important aspect to take into account for the fisheries management of this resource, since effective population size could be overestimated.engCopyright: © 2020 Rodríguez-Pena et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/Mitochondrial DNAHeteroplasmyHybridizationIncidenceMaja brachydactylaMaja squinadojournal articleopen access10.1371/journal.pone.0230243