Methodology Report Using the Developmental Gene Bicoid to Identify Species of

Copyright © 2013 Seong Hwan Park et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Identifying species of insects used to estimate postmortem interval (PMI) is amajor subject in forensic entomology. Because forensic insect specimens are morphologically uniform and are obtained at various developmental stages, DNAmarkers are greatly needed. To develop new autosomal DNA markers to identify species, partial genomic sequences of the bicoid (bcd) genes, containing the homeobox and its flanking sequences, from 12 blowfly species (Aldrichina grahami, Calliphora vicina, Calliphora lata, Triceratopyga calliphoroides, Chrysomya megacephala, Chrysomya pinguis, Phormia regina, Lucilia ampullacea, Lucilia caesar, Lucilia illustris, Hemipyrellia ligurriens and Lucilia sericata; Calliphoridae: Diptera) were determined and analyzed. This study first sequenced the ten blowfly species other than C. vicina and L. sericata. Based on the bcd sequences of these 12 blowfly species, a phylogeneti