Abstract:

Accurate species identification has become a precondition for accomplished biodiversity administration and further genetic research. Species acquaintance technics require molecular tools such as DNA barcoding as well as morphological identification for accurate identification. Particularly, the application of subunit I of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase (COI) gene for DNA barcoding for insects has approved to be very useful in species acquaintance. The main aim of this study is to generate the first reference library of DNA barcode for cockroaches in Turkey using previously published data. As a result of the literature research, it has been observed that no study has been carried out on the DNA barcode of Turkish cockroaches. Therefore, in this study, we evaluated the advantage of DNA barcoding applied to two cockroach samples from Turkey for the first time. Our working samples implicated 10 DNA barcodes grounded on sequences created from our present study and 109 other DNA barcodes from BOLD. Various molecular analyzes including genetic distance-origin assessment (NeighborJoining and Maximum Likelihood trees) has been applied to accurately identify and describe species. In addition, Blaptica dubia (B. dubia) (Serville, 1838) and Nauphoeta cinerea (N. cinerea) (Olivier, 1789) have been reported as the first country records. It has been observed that reference libraries like BOLD are not yet sufficiently populated with COI sequences of Turkish cockroach species. In order for Turkish cockroach bio-assessment and biodiversity studies to benefit from the advantages of DNA barcoding, it is of great importance that cockroach inventories and taxonomic studies include DNA barcodes.

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