Testing The Effectiveness of Short Cytochrome-Oxidase I Sequences on The Phylogenetic Study of Miniopterus schreibersii and Miniopterus pallidus

Abstract

The present study aimed to evaluate the usefulness and efficiency of 183 base pair length Cytochrome-oxidase I (COI) sequence data for the differentiation of the closely related Miniopterus schreibersii and Miniopterus pallidus. These two bat species were previously recognised as the same species under the name M. schreibersii complex, and as a result of some studies involving mitochondrial DNA, M. pallidus was upgraded to species status. The results of the Bayesian Inference tree and the Median-joining network, as well as mean genetic distance and fixation index values, were compared with the results in the literature and were found to be compatible with each other. Consequently, analyses with short COI sequences support the validity of the aforementioned miniopterine species. It is also emphasized that the COI gene, even if short, is effective in distinguishing closely-related species.

Keywords

• Cytochrome-oxidase I
• Miniopterus
• Mitochondrial DNA
• Phylogeny

Ethical Statement

Dead specimens were collected as carcasses and no living animals were treated. For this reason, no ethical approval was required.

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