Abstract
Aphids are a species rich group comprising many important pests. However, species identification can be very difficult for aphids due to their morphological ambiguity. DNA barcoding has been widely adopted for rapid and reliable species identification as well as cryptic species detection. In this study, we investigated cryptic diversity in the subfamily Calaphidinae (Hemiptera: Aphididae) based on 899 sequences of cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) for 115 morphospecies (78 species collected in this study and sequences of 73 species downloaded from Genbank). Among these 115 morphospecies, DNA barcoding results of 90 (78.3%) species were identical to results of morphological identification. However, 25 (21.7%) morphospecies showed discrepancies between DNA barcoding and traditional taxonomy. Among these 25 discordances, a total of 15 cryptic species were identified from 12 morphospecies. We also found three morphologically distinct species pairs that sharing DNA barcoding. Based on molecular operational taxonomic unit (MOTU) estimation, we discussed on species delimitation threshold value for these taxa. Our findings confirm that Calaphidinae has high cryptic diversity even though aphids are relatively well-studied.
Highlights
Detecting cryptic species is essential for precise species diversity estimation [1]
A total of 501 c oxidase I (COI) sequences (! 546 bp) from 78 morphospecies belonging to 36 genera of four subtribes, Calaphidina, Monaphidina, Myzocallidina and Panaphidina were newly generated in this study (S1 Table)
This study demonstrates that DNA barcoding can be used to reliably identify aphid species in the subfamily Calaphidinae
Summary
Detecting cryptic species is essential for precise species diversity estimation [1]. With the availability of DNA barcoding methods, recognition of cryptic species has been increased over the past decades [1]. DNA sequences of approximately 10% of all described species High cryptic diversity of Calaphidinae (Hemiptera: Aphididae) only enough for species identification and can be used as an alternative to classical taxonomy [4]. DNA barcoding has been contributed to resolve morphological ambiguity in various taxa [5,6,7,8,9] with identification accuracy rate of 97% [10,11,12,13]. DNA barcoding enables the detection of cryptic species and reassessment of species diversity
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