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This research article presents a molecular phylogenetic investigation focusing on closely related Cossid moth species within the Cossidae family from diverse geographical areas. The study aims to identify the species as well determine the evolutionary relationships among closely related Cossid moth species as many of them looks very similar and are difficult to distinguish only basing on morphological characters. We first amplified approximately 700 base pairs (bp) of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit-1 gene (MT-CO1), extracted from the thoracic region of the adult cossid moths which were collected from Kedima-Nagaland, India. Although, morphologically many Cossid species has been extensively studied, its evolutionary relationship to other members of the same genus, family or sub-families remains uncertain being a very diverse group. Therefore, this study provides the first description of the evolutionary relationship between the studied Cossid moth with respect to other geographically diverse Cossid species. To analyse the connections among the Cossid species, phylogenetic trees were constructed using data from an additional 58 Cossid species. The Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian analysis were used to construct the phylogenetic tree. In Both the techniques it demonstrated robust bootstrap support for the obtained phylogenetic relationships. Our study effectively identified the Cossid species and presented compelling evidence for the CO1 gene's efficacy in differentiating closely related species, as corroborated from our phylogenetic analysis. These results enhance our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics within the Cossidae family and offer valuable insights into the phylogenetic associations among closely related Cossid moth species. Here, we have also reported new MT-CO1 sequence of the studied Cossid species and have deposited in GenBank database PP358253.
Khesoh et al. (Tue,) studied this question.