Dear Evoldir members, Sorry for the delay to post the answers I got for a hypervariable mitochondrial region to amplify in Gastropods or any Mollusca. Unfortunately I didn¡¯t receive good news, apparently gastropod mt genome doesn't have a HVR or even very many intergenic spaces. here are some of the main answers I received. Thank you all. I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you. I've wished many times that my land snails had a hyper variable region so I could get some better resolution in the shallow regions of my phylogeny. Sadly it seems the gastropod mt genome doesn't have a HVR or even very many intergenic spaces, attached is a review that cites all the whole mt genome sequences published for molluscs if you want to check it out for yourself. You may not find enough variation in the mitochondrial DNA. Many inverts have slower evolutionary rates for mtDNA nearly equal to their nuclear genome. This was the case in some California limpets that I helped a student with. You also may be looking at relatively recent divergence among the populations, as well. In the group of the pulmonates I've looked for exactly the same as you: hypervariable loci on the mitochondrion. Alas, it did not work for me either. I've also checked CO1 and 16S. However, SNPs seem to be much more abundant on CO1 than on 16S, and enzymatic digestion may give lots of variation. In addition, in many groups there is this hypervariable region on the mitochondrion called the d-loop. Carla Biol. Mar¨ªa Carla de Aranzamendi Gen¨¦tica de Poblaciones y Evoluci¨®n Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, F¨ªsicas y Naturales Universidad Nacional de C¨®rdoba Argentina Tel: +54-351-4332090 int. 34 To: juan_jmart@yahoo.com.ar