In Burkina Faso, seeds of Senegalia macrostachya (Rchb. Ex DC.) Kyal. & Boatwr. during storage are attacked by a pest morphologically identified as Caryedon mauritanicus auct. In 2004, Anton and Delobel described it for the first time under a new name 'Caryedon furcatus'. Thus, C. mauritanicus is now considered to be C. furcatus. In the present study, for the first time, genetic characterization of C. furcatus was carried out to determine its genetic identity in order to assess whether it is evolutionarily similar or related to C. mauritanicus. The pest's 12S gene was partially sequenced after extraction and amplification by Polymerase Chain Reaction. The percentage identity between C. furcatus and C. mauritanicus sequences was determined. The variability of genetic parameters, namely the number of polymorphic sites, the number of informative sites, the number of haplotypes, haplotypic diversity, nucleotide frequency, nucleotide diversity and the average number of nucleotide differences were determined. We obtained a very high percentage of identity, ranging from 93.10 to 99.67% with respect to the C. mauritanicus species. The results also showed that eleven of the 208 sites were polymorphic. The values for nucleotide composition show a predominance of Adenine and Thymine (76.32%) compared with Guanine and Cytosine (23.68%). C. furcatus has high haplotypic diversity (0.717) and low nucleotide diversity (0.006). The similarity percentage obtained shows that C. furcatus, which is the subject of this study, is genetically identical to C. mauritanicus.
Senegalia macrostachya, Careydon furcatus, Caryedon mauritanicus, molecular identification, genetic identity