Molecular Identification of some Indian Muscid flies (Diptera: Muscidae) based on mitochondrial gene COII

Abstract

Taxonomic identification of flies having medical and veterinary importance is often complicated due to the lookalike morphological characters. Molecular identification of five Indian muscid flies (Musca domestica, Musca sorbens, Musca crassirostris, Stomoxys calcitrans and Haematobia irritans) has been attempted on the basis of mitochondrial COII gene. Sequences of 500-520 bp were analysed and found to be A+T rich. Rate of transitions was higher than transversions. The average haplotype diversity was 0.833 and nucleotide diversity was 0.02547 within the different species, which were calculated with the DnaSP Version 5.0. The genetic distances calculated by K2P model, showed the interspecific distances range more than 8.2%, while the intraspecific distance range had not exceed 0.8%. The 1000 bootstrapped Neighbour-joining tree and Maximum likelihood tree were constructed to establish the phylogenetic relationship between the different muscid species. The results show the robustness of COII gene as a diagnostic marker. The data obtained from this study would be worthy for medical and veterinary entomologists for precise identification of imperative muscid species.