DNA Fingerprinting and Phylogenetics of Five Species Of Genus Culex Using ITS2 Sequence (Diptera: Culicidae)

The present paper deals with the ITS2 sequence based interspecific variations and molecular phylogenetics of five Oriental species of genus Culex viz: Cx. quinquefasciatus, Cx. vishnui, Cx. bitaeniorhynchus, Cx. tritaeniorhynchus and Cx. mimeticus. The length of ITS2 sequence varied from 323 to 410 bp with G:C content ranging from 50.7% to 66.5%. The sequence carried indels at 221 positions while the transition to transversion (ts/tv) ratio ranged from 0.41 to 0.76 in which Cx. tritaeniorhynchus had the lowest ts/tv value of 0.04 while Cx. mimeticus had the highest value of 0.76. The most frequent transversions were of the A:T type. By using the sequence of Anopheles stephensi taken as an outgroup, the maximum parsimony based phylogenetic tree with threshold (considering only the transversions) showed that An. stephensi and Cx. quinquefasciatus were supported by 100% bootstrap value beyond which all other species got bifurcated into two clades in which one clade consisted of Cx. tritaeniorhynchus + Cx. mimeticus with a bootstrap value of 62.8% while the other consisted of Cx. bitaeniorhynchus + Cx. vishnui with a value of 19.5%.