Department of Legal Medicine, College of Medicine, Korea University, Korea. jjhwang@korea.ac.kr

Department of Elementary Science Education, Chinju National University of Education, Korea.

DNA barcoding was recently introduced to molecular identification of forensically important fly species. So, we have analysed the barcode region (687 nucleotides) of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene for four species of Muscidae flies collected from Korea. The sequences were aligned and analysed to construct a phylogenetic tree using DNA Star 5.01(DNAStar Inc) and MEGA 3.1 program(Kumar, Tamura, Nei 2004). Intraspecific variation was not noted between M.stabulans individual to each other. Intraspecific variation ranges of other species were 0.1%, 0.1~0.3% and 0.1~0.6% for O.leucostoma, M.angustifrons and M.domestica, respectively. Interspecific percent distance was minimal(9.7~10.0%) between M.stabulans and M.angustifrons. Other species showed above 10% distance from each other. The result showed that four species of Muscidae fly species (Muscina angustifrons, Muscina stabulans, Ophyra leucostoma and Musca domestica) were identifiable from each other with analysis of barcode region of COI gene. Therefore, we conclude that species identification of forensically important Muscidae flies used in this study is possible with percent distance of sequences of COI barcode region, but more species and individuals should be examined to be confident about the conclusion.

Key words : cytochrome oxidase subunit I, barcode, Muscidae, Forensic entomology