Phylogenetic relationship of Turkish Apis mellifera subspecies based on sequencing of mitochondrial cytochrome C oxidase I region

Mitochondrial DNA sequence variation can be used to infer honey bee evolutionary relationships. We examined DNA sequence diversity in the cytochrome C oxidase I (COI or Cox1) gene segment of the mitochondrial genome in 112 samples of Apis mellifera from 15 different populations in Turkey. Six novel haplotypes were found for the COI gene segment. There were eight variable sites in the COI gene, although only three were parsimony-informative sites. The mean pairwise genetic distance was 0.3% for the COI gene segment. Neighbor-joining (NJ) trees of the COI gene segment were constructed with the published sequences of A. mellifera haplotypes that are available in GenBank; the genetic variation was compared among the different honeybee haplotypes. The NJ dendogram based on the COI sequences available in GenBank showed that Eastern European races were clustered together, whereas the Mellifera and Iberian haplotypes were clustered far apart. The haplotypes found in this study were clustered together with A. mellifera ligustica and some of the Greek honey bees (accession Nos. GU056169 and GU056170) found in NCBI GenBank database. This study expands the knowledge about the mitochondrial COI region and presents the first comprehensive sequence analysis of this region in Turkish honeybees.