Reconstructing phylogenetic relationship among Indian termite species inferred from COII gene sequences (Blattodea: Isoptera: Termitidae)

Abstract

To analyze the phylogenetic relationship among nine species of Indian termites, 675 base pairs fragment of complete COII gene was utilized. Neighbor-joining (NJ) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) methods were used in Molecular Evolutionary Genetic Analysis (MEGA 5.2) software to define the molecular phylogeny. Both the trees revealed almost identical topology among the species and paraphyly of Microcerotermes and monophyly of the species belonging to subfamily Macrotermitinae of family Termitidae were strongly supported by two reconstruction methods.