Search

Analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences (12S, 16S, and COII) were conducted to determine the phylogenetic relationships among the following 11 putative subterranean termites of Coptotermes: Coptotermes cochlearus Xia & He, Coptotermes curvignathus Holmgren, Coptotermes dimorphus Xia & He, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, Coptotermes gestroi (Wasmann), Coptotermes kalshoveni Kemner, Coptotermes sepangensis Krishna, and Coptotermes travians (Haviland) from East Asia, and Coptotermes acinaciformis Froggatt, Coptotermes frenchi Hill, and Coptotermes lacteus (Froggatt) from Australia. Available sequences for these species and those of Coptotemes guangzhouensis Ping from GenBank also were included in the analyses. Maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood of the combined nucleotide matrices of the 12S, 16S, and COII genes resulted in two major clades with six subclades: I (C. acinaciformis), II (C. lacteus and C. frenchi), III (C. curvignathus), IV (C. kalshoveni, C. sepangensis and C. travians), V (C. gestroi) and VI (C. formosanus, C. cochlearus, C. dimorphus and C. guangzhouensis). C. cochlearus and C. dimorphus are possibly junior synonyms of C. formosanus with nucleotide differences of up to 1.0%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]