Molecular Identification and Phylogenetic Analysis of Some Common Beetles (Coleoptera) of Jammu Region, India Using DNA Barcoding

Coleoptera is a highly diverse and taxonomically important order of Class Insecta. DNA Barcoding hasproven its effectiveness as an accurate molecular taxonomy tool in differentiating various species belongingto same genus. We carried out a pilot study for testing the effectiveness of mitochondrial cytochrome Coxidase sub unit 1 based DNA Barcoding for common species of beetles from Jammu region of UT of J&K.Successful generation of DNA barcodes of 04 species was achieved and the sequences were submitted toGenBank. The phylogenetic analysis was performed by using Neighbor-Joining method and Kimura-2-Parameter with 1000 bootstrap supports, gap opening penalty of 15.00 and a gap extension penalty of 6.66in both pair-wise as well as multiple alignments.