Abstract
The Hymenoptera is one of the vital and biggest insect orders comprising the bees, wasps, sawflies, and ants. Wasps are important to natural and biological pest control because they are predators or parasitoids of pest arthropods. This study investigated the genetic diversity among the three wasps, Vespa orientalis Linnaeus, Polistes bucharensis Erichson, and Polistes mongolicus du Buysson, collected from three different governorates in Egypt, using cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) DNA barcoding. PCR was performed to amplify COI fragment. The amplified COI regions (710 bp) were sequenced and analyzed. All novel nucleotide sequences of COI gene were deposited into the GenBank database. The genetic distances were estimated using Kimura two-parameter model. In spite of the wide geographical range, minor genetic diversity was observed between some populations of the three wasp species, revealing unrestricted gene flow between them. Phylogenetic relationship analysis was performed, using maximum likelihood (ML) method. The results of the phylogenetic analyses recovered P. bucharensis more closely related to P. dominula and P. gallicus. P. mongolicus collected from Menofia Governorate formed a distinct branch with 99% support. V. orientalis was sister to the yellowjacket Dolichovespula adulterine, with 84% support. It can be concluded that DNA barcode is a powerful tool for rapid and accurate identification of Egyptian wasp species.
Highlights
Wasps are predators or parasitoids of pest arthropods, so they are imperative to normal and biological control of pests (Hunt 2007)
A bootstrap phylogenetic tree based on cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences of the local isolated wasps and other species was constructed using neighbor joining (NJ) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods with Kimura twoparameter model
ML tree topology reflected a strong relation between V. orientalis, collected from different localities in Egypt, which clustered together with 100% support with other V. orientalis isolates found in GenBank and with 84% support with Dolichovespula adulterine (Fig. 2)
Summary
Wasps are predators or parasitoids of pest arthropods, so they are imperative to normal and biological control of pests (Hunt 2007). These insects have an essential part in pollination, a few of them in wax and honey production (Grissell 2010). The Vespidae are a large (about 5000 species), assorted cosmopolitan family of wasps, counting about all the known eusocial wasps (such as Polistes spp., Vespa orientalis, and Vespula germanica) and numerous single wasps (Grissell 2010). The paper wasp genus Polistes Latreille, 1802, is an imperative model group for behavioral and developmental studies (Tibbetts 2007 and Jandt et al 2014). It incorporates numerous eusocial species that show
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