MORPHO MOLECULAR TAXONOMY AND BIOINFORMATICS BASED PHYLOGENY OF BASED PHYLOGENY OF BASED PHYLOGENY OF Metaphire posthuma Metaphire posthuma (SIMS AND EASTON 1972)

Abstract

The species of earthworm Pheretima posthuma (Vaillant, 1868) now known as Metaphire posthuma (Sims and Easton, 1972) collected from Ranchi, has been re-described based on morphological features following the key of Chang et al. (2016). The specimen has been further identified on molecular basis for the first time from Jharkhand state. The Ranchi specimen GenBank accession number PP832872 showed genetic difference form specimen collected from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Mizoram while it revealed 100% similarity with specimens from Thailand and China. The intra-species phylogeny has been established on the basis of BLAST score when successfully generated DNA barcode sequence of mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase – 1 (CO1) of the specimens was subjected to it. The distance matrix has been calculated to get pair wise genetic difference among the twelve strains of the species obtained from GenBank and our sequence on the basis of BLAST test. The morphology based key appeared to be applicable for this species.