Inferência filogenética de Apoidea (Hymenoptera) a partir da análise do grau de homologia do citocromo c por ferramentas de bioinformática

Abstract

The Apoidea superfamily (Hymenoptera) is home to about 30,000 recorded species and consists of several subgroups of apoid bees and wasps, with different types of habits from kleptoparist to eusociality. The species of this subfamily can be identified by body division (head, mesosoma and metasoma) and by the presence or absence of hair on the body. Due to the great difficulty in establishing molecular markers that can infer the phylogeny of this group, we aimed in this work to verify if cytochrome c, a protein essential to oxidative metabolism and energy production, highly conserved in species, can satisfactorily fulfill this role. The work consisted of two approaches: 1) the search for the primary sequences of cytochrome c of organisms of the Apoidea superfamily available in biological databases (NCBI Protein), for subsequent multiple alignment and obtaining a phylogenetic tree through the MAFFT program; 2) comparison with the phylogenies present in the literature. FASTA sequences were obtained from 15 species, all containing 108 amino acid residues. The cladogram obtained from the proposed alignment shows that the Bombini and Apini tribes seem to form a sister group. The study also showed that the common ancestor that gives rise to the Euglossini tribe also gives rise to the Bombini, Apini and Meliponini tribes, thus demonstrating that Apini and Euglossini can be paraphyletic groups. Despite the few Apoidea cytochrome c sequences available in the NCBI Protein, it was possible to observe that the cladogram seems to go against some proposals in the literature, suggesting that cytochrome c seems to be promising for this purpose. However, this study does not immediately propose a new classification, as it would be necessary to analyze a greater number of primary sequences from different Apoidea species. Therefore, more studies are needed in different groups among the Hymenoptera so that it is possible to use cytochrome c as a possible marker.