Abai, MR

6th International Congress of DipterologyAn assessment of the utility of DNA barcoding fordifferentiating species in chironomidsMartin, J. (1) & Y. Parsons (2)(1) Department of Genetics, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia(2) Department of Genetics, La Trobe University, Victoria, 3086, AustraliaChironomids have been investigated extensively in paleogeographic andbiomonitoring studies. However such studies are hampered by thedifficulty of accurately separating species, particularly in the larval stage.Consequently it has been common to use only family level identification,but recent studies are showing this results in loss of much importantinformation and that species level identification is preferable. DNAbarcoding, using the mitochondrial COI gene, has been advocated as asolution to these problems. However, in chironomids there are potentialproblems from complexes of sibling and cryptic species, as well as frommitochondrial introgression between closely related species. Since thegroup includes both species with extremely broad and with very limiteddistributions, the amount of intraspecific sequence divergence could bequite variable. We are investigating the genus Chironomus and relatedtaxa that will enable a comparison of the levels of intra- and inter-specificsequence divergence, with the aim of establishing whether COI sequenceoffers a real solution for rapid and accurate identification of species in thisgroup.Key Words: Chironomidae, species complex, COI, intraspecific variability∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗156