Abstract
We investigated the effectiveness of the standard 648 bp mitochondrial COI barcode region in discriminating among Satyrine species from China. A total of 214 COI sequences were obtained from 90 species, including 34 species that have never been barcoded. Analyses of genetic divergence show that the mean interspecific genetic divergence is about 16-fold higher than within species, and little overlap occurs between them. Neighbour-joining (NJ) analyses showed that 48 of the 50 species with two or more individuals, including two cases with deep intraspecific divergence (>3%), are monophyletic. Furthermore, when our sequences are combined with the conspecific sequences sampled from distantly geographic regions, the “barcoding gap” still exists, and all related species are recovered to be monophyletic in NJ analysis. Our study demonstrates that COI barcoding is effective in discriminating among the satyrine species of China, and provides a reference library for their future molecular identification.
Acknowledgements
We express our sincere thanks to Paul Hebert (Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada) for DNA sequencing and revisionary suggestions to our manuscript.
Declaration of interest
This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (2011FY120200, 2006FY120100) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31201733). All authors have read and agree with the contents of the manuscript. The authors report no conflict of interest, including financial interests, relationships and affiliations.