First comparative phenetic studies of the polymorphic species of Coccinella undecimpunctata Linnaeus, using morphometric and RAPD approaches in Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Entomology, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, Abbasia- Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

In this study, numerical phenetic method and RAPD-PCR technique were carried out on the species Coccinella undecimpunctata L. and its 13 aberrations which were collected from 10 localities in Egypt.
The morphometric analysis and phenotypic features were determined for the aberrations to reveal the phenetic relationships among them. The resulted phenogram showed high degree of variations and affinities (Similarity coeffeciant ranged from 44.7 to 85.7%). RAPD fingerprint profiles were generated by using 5 random primers on genomic DNA to evaluate their phenetic relationships and to investigate the molecular markers among the aberrations genotypes. The similarity coefficient of the produced DNA fragments ranged from 40% to 93.75%.
Cluster analysis based on both morphometric and RAPD data showed that the 14 morphs are grouped into 9 clusters against 8 clusters respectively. In addition, PCA plot allowed differentiating three groups from morphometric data against four groups from RAPD data.  

Keywords