The complete and annotated mitochondrial genome of Hemileia vastatrix Race I, causal agent of coffee leaf rust.
Hemileia vastatrix is the fungal pathogen responsible for coffee leaf rust (CLR), the most economically important disease of Coffea arabica worldwide. Recently, the nuclear genome of this fungus was completely deciphered. However, the mitochondrial genome of H. vastatrix has remained undercharacterized. Here, we present the complete, circularized mitochondrial genome of H. vastatrix Race I (isolate HvRI), assembled using a hybrid approach combining PacBio HiFi long reads and BGIseq short reads. The genome is 173,525 bp in length with a GC content of 33.1% and encodes 41 functional genes, including 15 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNAs, and 24 tRNAs. The assembly reveals significant structural complexity, driven by intron expansion in the cox1 and cob genes. Notably, the atp8 gene contains a group II intron, rare for this locus, whose internal open reading frame displays evidence of pseudogenization via internal stop codons.. We also characterized a putative replication initiation zone (~1.2 kb) defined by a poly-G homopolymer and conserved regulatory motifs. The mitogenome of the HvRI isolate does not contain cob mutations that lead to amino acid substitutions G143A and F129L associated with the quinone outside inhibitor (QoI) fungicide resistance. This high-quality mitogenome is an important resource for comparative mitogenomics, population diversity studies, and the molecular surveillance of QoI fungicide resistance.