DNA Barcoding and Renewed Taxonomy of South American Clouded Sulphurs (Lepidoptera: Pieridae: Colias)

Phylogeography of Two Enigmatic Sulphur Butterflies, Colias mongola Alphéraky, 1897 and Colias tamerlana Staudinger, 1897 (Lepidoptera, Pieridae), with Relations to Wolbachia Infection

“…Colias Fabricius, 1807 (Lepidoptera, Pieridae) is one of the largest pierid genera, with approximately 90 described species [1][2][3][4]. The genus has a predominantly Holarctic distribution, with a few species occurring in the Afrotropical, Oriental and Neotropical biogeographical regions [4][5][6][7]. Although Colias butterflies are among the most spectacular and well-known Lepidoptera, which historically attracted much attention from researchers and collectors, their taxonomy is still poorly elucidated.…”

“…Over the last decades, the rapid development and implementation of new molecular techniques and approaches validated mitochondrial (e.g., DNA barcodes) and nuclear DNA markers as a useful and efficient tool for species identification, detecting and analyzing cryptic diversity, revealing interspecific and deep-level relationships and phylogenetic structure in taxonomically challenging groups of insects, solving longstanding taxonomic problems [23,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. Despite the broad and constantly growing usage of DNA-based techniques in butterfly taxonomy and molecular systematics, surprisingly few studies focused, so far, on the genus Colias [6,[42][43][44][45][46]. Moreover, all but a few research studies aimed at inferring Colias phylogeny or relating to molecular aspects of the genus were based on a limited set of taxa and/or poor specimen sampling.…”