| Abstract |
Due to habitat complexities, assessment of terrestrial arthropods has faced two serious barriers: ineffective sampling and unreliable tools for species identification. The latter has been circumvented by DNA barcoding. This study aims to determine the efficiency of DNA barcodes to diagnose species in different taxonomic groups of Philippine arthropods using the mitochondrial gene, cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI). From 2015 to 2016, a Malaise trap was deployed for 26 weeks at two sampling sites located within the vicinity of National Power Corporation, Iligan City. In total, 52 sampling weeks were collected and 13 samples from each site was analyzed resulting in 33,191 arthropod specimens. Standard DNA barcoding workflows were conducted at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The preliminary results showed 27,783 COI barcodes of arthropods belonging to 183 families with 54 species that are new records to the Philippines. Sequence analysis against an existing barcode reference library revealed 2,888 distinct Barcode Index Numbers (BINs), 92.21% of which was found to be concordant with currently accepted taxonomy (excluding singletons). Moreover, the effectiveness of this library was demonstrated using the Neighbour-Joining tree of 973 specimens that formed species-specific barcode clusters, thus allowing successful species identification. This was also supported using the sequence-based specimen identification on the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD). In addition, Refined Single Linkage Analysis of 18,611 sequences showed a consistent cluster of sequences in Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) with intraspecific distance of 0% - 3.88% and interspecific distance of 1.08% 脙垄脗聙脗聯 32.22%. This study suggests that DNA barcode reference library is of significance in arthropod taxonomy, conservation and monitoring. |
Mindanao State
University - Iligan Institute of Technology