Abstract
Abstract
Tephritid fruit flies of the tribe Dacini rank among the most economically destructive agricultural pests globally, with several
Bactrocera
Macquart and
Zeugodacus
Hendel species causing severe losses to fruit and vegetable production across South and Southeast Asia. Bangladesh harbors five dacine species of primary agricultural significance:
Bactrocera dorsalis
(Hendel),
B. carambolae
Drew & Hancock,
B. zonata
(Saunders),
B. correcta
(Bezzi), and
Zeugodacus cucurbitae
(Coquillett). Here we present a comparative mitogenomic and molecular phylogenetic framework based on 21 unique mitogenome records retrieved from NCBI GenBank, representing 19 dacine ingroup taxa and two outgroups. Direct parsing of the GenBank sequences confirmed the canonical complement of 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs) and two rRNA genes in all 21 records. Among the 14
Bactrocera
ingroup taxa, genome size ranged from 15,273 to 15,977 bp. Whole-genome AT content ranged from 66.6% in
Bactrocera tsuneonis
to 82.2% in
Drosophila melanogaster
; the five Bangladesh-relevant dacine pest species showed tightly clustered AT content of 72.9-73.6%. A concatenated alignment of 13,600 nucleotide sites (13 PCGs + 12S + 16S rRNA) was analyzed by maximum-likelihood inference under the GTR+FO model (IQ-TREE v1.6.11; 1,000 ultrafast bootstrap replicates). The ML tree recovers the
B. dorsalis
complex (UFBoot = 79-100) and places
B. correcta
and
B. zonata
as a maximally supported sister pair (UFBoot = 100). This study provides a sequence-verified mitogenomic reference framework for molecular identification and pest surveillance in Bangladesh, and should be interpreted as a curated comparative baseline rather than a population-genomic analysis, as no newly collected Bangladeshi specimens were sequenced.