Molecular Identification and Phylogenetic relationship of Corvus splendens (Common House Crow) by Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene

Abstract The traditional taxonomic approach for identification of species and their phylogenetic relationship is handicapped due to its limitations. The present study is carried out to evaluate the genetic identification and phylogenetic status of Corvus splendens (Common house crow) using mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COX1). We amplified 690bp region of COX I from crow specimens collected from seven cities of Punjab. The PCR product was got sequenced and submitted to NCBI. Multiple sequence alignment was done among 10 Pakistani specimens and 18 species of common crow belonging to different families obtained from GenBank database using Gyps indicus as an outgroup. Phylogenetic tree was constructed among various Crow species by Neighbor Joining method (NJ) in MEGA X. It shows that KAS2 & NAR2 were very similar and shared evolutionary relationship with Common house crow from India. While KAS3 and LHR5 showed very close resemblance and shared common ancestry with the NAR3. The relative time tree shows the SKT2 evolved earlier than BHR1, PKT2, BHR2 & GUJ3 while the later were evolved at the same time. Further, the entire crow species irrespective of regions evolved almost at the same time with very little time difference. The genetic distance among the Common house crow from different localities showed very low degree of sequence divergence despite long physical distances among them. Overall, our analysed Corvus splendens were closely related to each other and evolved at same time. Moreover, these crows were closely related to other crow species dispersed all over the world.