Abstract: In order to obtain the characteristics of the mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) and explore phylogenetic relationship, the mitogenome sequence of Stephanitis chinensis collected from Ankang city, Shaanxi Province was determined by Illumina and Sanger sequencing methods. The result shows that the mitogenome of S. chinensis is 18 085 bp in length, including 37 coding genes [13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 tRNAs, and 2 rRNAs], and one control region of 3 678 bp. The gene organization of S. chinensis is the same as the ancestral gene order of insect mitogenome. The AT content of whole mitogenome is 78.10%. Among the 13 PCGs, six start with the typical ATG, seven start with ATT or ATA, and ten end with the typical TAA or TAG. Only cox2, atp6 and cox3 terminate with T. The highly occurred codons in the PCGs are UUA, AUU, UUU and AUA, and the top 4 amino acids are Leu, Ile, Phe and Ser. There are 23 mismatches of GU, UU, GA and AA in 22 tRNAs. All the tRNAs could form the common clover-leaf secondary structures, except trnS1(GCU), which lacks the DHU arm. The control region contains 3 type of non-tandem repeats and 4 (TTAG)_n in the front-end region (FER) and one tandem repeat in the back-end region (BER), and several stem-loop structures. Phylogenetic analysis shows that Stephanitis mendica has the closest relationship with S. chinensis. All the insects from Tingidae were clustered together, and placed at the base part of the phylogenetic tree.

Key words: Stephanitis chinensis, mitochondrial genome, sequence analysis, phylogenetic relationship