Arif I A, Khan H A, Shobrak M, Williams J
Department of Botany and Microbiology, College of Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Genet Mol Res. 2011 Oct 21;10(4):3992-8. doi: 10.4238/2011.October.21.2.
DNA barcoding using mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) is regarded as a standard method for species identification. Recent reports have also shown extended applications of COI gene analysis in phylogeny and molecular diversity studies. The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae. There are 26 species worldwide; five of them are found in Saudi Arabia. Until now, GenBank included a COI barcode for only one species of bee-eater, the European bee-eater (Merops apiaster). We sequenced the 694-bp segment of the COI gene of the green bee-eater M. orientalis and compared the sequences with those of M. apiaster. Pairwise sequence comparison showed 66 variable sites across all the eight sequences from both species, with an interspecific genetic distance of 0.0362. Two and one within-species variable sites were found, with genetic distances of 0.0005 and 0.0003 for M. apiaster and M. orientalis, respectively. This is the first study reporting barcodes for M. orientalis.
使用线粒体细胞色素c氧化酶亚基I（COI）进行DNA条形码分析被视为物种鉴定的标准方法。最近的报告还显示了COI基因分析在系统发育和分子多样性研究中的广泛应用。蜂虎是蜂虎科中一类近雀形目的鸟类。全球共有26种；其中5种在沙特阿拉伯被发现。到目前为止，GenBank中仅包含一种蜂虎——欧蜂虎（Merops apiaster）的COI条形码。我们对绿蜂虎（M. orientalis）的COI基因694个碱基对的片段进行了测序，并将这些序列与欧蜂虎的序列进行了比较。成对序列比较显示，两个物种的所有八个序列共有66个可变位点，种间遗传距离为0.0362。在欧蜂虎和绿蜂虎中分别发现了2个和1个种内可变位点，遗传距离分别为0.0005和0.0003。这是首次报道绿蜂虎条形码的研究。
