AMPLIFICATION OF THE COMPLETE MITOCHONDRIAL GENOME OF 2 PROTOSTOME WORMS - A USEFUL, TECHNIQUE FOR COMPARATIVE-STUDIES OF METAZOAN MITOCHONDRIAL-DNA

We report the first polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of t he complete mitochondrial genomes of a nemertean and a sipunculan worm in one piece using a recently published two-polymerase protocol for l ong and accurate DNA amplification. Successful amplification was achie ved from nanogram quantities of both purified mitochondrial DNA (nemer tean) and crude total DNA (sipunculan). This technique allows the rapi d generation of sufficient quantities of entire mitochondrial DNAs for cloning and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analyses, and thus will facilitate comparative studies of metazoan mitochondria l genomes.