Drawing mitochondrial genomes with circularMT

Abstract Summary Mitochondrial DNA sequences are used extensively in phylogeographic and phylogenetic studies for a wide range of organisms. With the advent of low-cost, high-throughput “next generation” DNA sequencing, and user-friendly bioinformatics pipelines for generating and annotating whole mitochondrial genome assemblies, the analysis of whole mitochondrial genomes has become an important component of phylogenomic studies for taxa with high species diversity but limited coverage for other genomic resources. An important step in characterizing de novo mitochondrial genome assemblies is to evaluate and describe structural rearrangements relative to reference taxa. Accessible tools are needed to help visualize gene and non-coding feature complement, their order, and strand orientation. However, there are few dedicated applications that generate high-quality genome diagrams. Here we present circularMT and circularMT-console that allow users to create highly customizable, publication-quality images, of linear and circular mitochondrial genome maps, either individually or integrated into an analysis pipeline. Availability and implementation Both applications are implemented in C#, with binaries, source code, and user guides available on GitHub (https://github.com/msjimc/circularMT). An archive of the published version is available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/10912319).