Identification Blow Fly Species in Korea by Mitochondrial DNA 'Barcodes'.

Zhang, Yong; Park, Seong Hwan; Yu, Dong Ha; Yu, Ga Young; Jung, Hyun Ju; Jo, Tae Ho; Hwang, Juck Joon

Original article

Korean Journal of Legal Medicine 2007;31(1):51-58.
Published online May 31, 2007.

Identification Blow Fly Species in Korea by Mitochondrial DNA 'Barcodes'.

Yong Zhang, Seong Hwan Park, Dong Ha Yu, Ga Young Yu, Hyun Ju Jung, Tae Ho Jo, Juck Joon Hwang

¹Department of Legal Medicine, Korea University College of Medicine, Korea. jjhwang@korea.ac.kr
²Department of Elementary Science Education, Chinju National University of Education, Korea.

Abstract

Recently many forensic scientists are trying to use the DNA 'barcode' region (upstream portion of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I) to identify the species of forensically important fly species. We have analyzed to compare their sequences of the 'barcode' region for twelve blow fly species[A. grahami, C.lata, C. vicina, H.ligurriens, L. ampullaceal, L. Caesar, L. illustris, P. sericata, P. regina, T. calliphoroides, C. megacephala, C. pinguis] collected from the rural and urban regions in Korea. Intra- and interspecies sequence divergences were calculated as 0~0.9% and 0.9~11.4%, respectively. Phylogenetic trees were drawn with Mega 3.1 and Network 4.20 programs. The result illustrates that each genus is grouped as monophyletic group except for T. calliphoroides and all the same species were monophyletic group. This suggests that the 'Barcode' region of COI gene could be a marker for identification of necrophagous blow fly species. But the two closely related species, L.illustris and L.caesar show little differences from each other. Therefore more individuals of these species should be examined for population study.

Key Words: Mitochondria cytochrome oxidase subunit I, barcode, blow fly