Trıgonaspıs synaspıs (Hymenoptera: Cynıpıdae) 'in Anadolu populasyonlarının moleküler varyasyonu,filocoğrafik ve filogenetik analizleri

Intraspecific molecular variation, phylogenetic and phylogeographic structure of Trigonaspis synaspis with wide distribution in Anatolia were investigated in this thesis through sequencing 433 basepairs of mitochondrial cyt b gene and complete ITS2 region of nuclear DNA. For this purpose, 166 individuals representing 21 populations have been studied and 50 unique cyt b and 15 ITS2 haplotypes were identified across the studied area. Genetic diversity estimates indicated the existence of high amount of molecular variation with the average gene diversity of 0.8554 and 0.3119 for the cyt b gene and ITS2 region, respectively. Likewise, nucleotide diversity was 0.0134 for cyt b gene and 0.0015 for the ITS2 region. The divergence between the cyt b haplotypes was ranging from 0.2 to 3.1%, and 0.2 to 2.8% between the ITS2 region haplotypes. Mismatch distribution analysis for both cyt b and ITS2 showed a unimodal profile indicating population expansion; however the values were not significantly supported by the statistical tests. Phylogenetic analyses of the cyt b haplotypes conducted through three different approaches produced mostly similar topologies with the best resolution provided by the Bayesian analysis. Overall, all analyses generated similar haplogroup structure and in most cases main clades corresponded the geographic locations of the haplotypes. From the geographic point of view, the grouping of the haplotypes with respect to the eastern or western localities was notorious. On the other hand all analyses conducted on the ITS2 region produced mostly similar topologies with polytomic haplogroup largely without apparent geographic structure. The conventional insect molecular clock applied to the mtDNA haplotypes signified the effects of the Quaternary climatic oscillations. Most of all, diversification of the outgroup haplotypes of T. megaptera from T. synaspis haplotypes goes back to 2.3 MYA which corresponds to the late Pliocene. Further, the Beast analysis related to the node ages extrapolated that the Pleistocene fluctuations were influential for shaping the major clade structure in T. synaspis. Furthermore, current results of this thesis support the findings of previous studies in the area that geography was also responsible for giving the subsequent phylogeographic structure among the T. synaspis lineages.