I am considering the use of CO1 to differentiate between different mosquito populations. Is it an ideal target gene? And does it have better resolution than ND4 and ITS1, ITS2 to differentiate between closely related species?
Dear Shillah, I will prefer using ITS2 to differentiate between close related mosquito species. COI gene is good for Bar coding of different mosquito species
in the case of Culex quinquefasciatus and culex pipiens, we will get the same sequence ... better to correlate with morphology. 36 ITS2 is a better option.
Please go through the following article
Anoopkumar, A. N., Puthur, S., Rebello, S., & Aneesh, E. M. (2019). Molecular characterization of Aedes, Culex, Anopheles, and Armigeres vector mosquitoes inferred by mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I gene sequence analysis. Biologia, 1-14. DOI : 10.2478/s11756-019-00231-0. Publisher: Springer