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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mark Goddard
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Pollen beetles (Nitidulidae, Meligethinae) are among the most abundant flower-visiting insects in Europe. While some species damage millions of hectares of crops annually, the biology of many species is little known. We assessed the utility of a 797 base pair fragment of the cytochrome oxidase 1 gene to resolve Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units in 750 adult pollen beetles sampled from flowers of 63 plant species sampled across the UK and continental Europe. We used the same locus to analyse region-scale patterns in population structure and demography in an economically important pest, Brassicogethes aeneus. We identified 44 Meligethinae at ca. 2% divergence, 35 of which contained published sequences. A few specimens could not be identified because the MOTUs containing them included published sequences for multiple Linnaean species, suggesting either retention of ancestral haplotype polymorphism or identification errors in published sequences. Over 90% of UK specimens were identifiable as Brassicogethes aeneus. Plant associations of adult B. aeneus were found to be far wider taxonomically than for their larvae. UK Brassicogethes aeneus populations showed contrasting affiliations between the north (most similar to Scandinavia and the Baltic) and south (most similar to western continental Europe), with strong signatures of population growth in the south.
Author(s): Ouvrard P, Hicks DM, Mouland M, Nicholls JA, Baldock KCR, Goddard MA, Kunin WE, Potts SG, Thieme T, Veromann E, Stone GN
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Genome
Year: 2016
Volume: 59
Issue: 12
Pages: 1101-1116
Online publication date: 18/07/2016
Acceptance date: 18/07/2016
Date deposited: 08/09/2016
ISSN (print): 0831-2796
ISSN (electronic): 1480-3321
Publisher: NRC Research Press
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/gen-2016-0020
DOI: 10.1139/gen-2016-0020
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