New insight into parrots' mitogenomes indicates that their ancestor contained a duplicated region.

Mitochondrial genomes of vertebrates are generally thought to evolve under strong selection for size reduction and gene order conservation. Therefore, a growing number of mitogenomes with duplicated regions changes our view on the genome evolution. Among Aves, order Psittaciformes (parrots) is especially noteworthy because of its large morphological, ecological and taxonomical diversity, which offers an opportunity to study genome evolution in various aspects. Former analyses showed that tandem duplications comprising the control region with adjacent genes are restricted to several lineages in which the duplication occurred independently. However, using an appropriate PCR strategy, we demonstrate that early diverged parrot groups contain mitogenomes with the duplicated region. These findings together with mapping duplication data from other mitogenomes onto parrot phylogeny indicate that the duplication was an ancestral state for Psittaciformes. The state was inherited by main parrot groups and was lost several times in some lineages. The duplicated regions were subjected to concerted evolution with a frequency higher than the rate of speciation. The duplicated control regions may provide a selective advantage due to a more efficient initiation of replication or transcription and a larger number of replicating genomes per organelle, which may lead to a more effective energy production by mitochondria. The mitogenomic duplications were associated with phenotypic features and parrots with the duplicated region can live longer, show larger body mass as well as predispositions to a more active flight. The results have wider implications on the presence of duplications and their evolution in mitogenomes of other avian groups.