Molecular barcoding of green bottle fly, Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) using COI gene sequences

Abstract

The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene has been proposed as standard DNA barcoding marker for the identification of organisms. COI provides an ideal species identification marker in insects, due to lack of introns, simple alignment, limited exposure to recombination and the availability of robust primer sites. Sequence variation in this region generally shows large interspecific, but small intraspecific divergence. Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) is the common green bottle fly found in most areas of the world, and the most well-known of the numerous green bottle fly species. L. sericata has much importance in the field of forensic entomology. We have amplified and sequenced a 545 bp fragment of cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene of L. sericata. The consensus sequence was searched for its similarity using BLAST programme of NCBI. The phylogeny tree construction and sequence divergence study were done.