The allopatric French Guiana H. melpomene melpomene population acts as a control for divergence at these loci, and so the much lower net divergence between H. melpomene rosina and H. cydno in Panama (1/60 at Mpi, 1/3 at Ci) compared with divergence between either taxon and H. melpomene from French Guiana is clearly aberrant.
The growing volume of barcode records has revealed that sequence variability within species is generally much lower than divergence among species, commonly referred to as the "barcoding gap", a pattern that occurs in diverse lineages, suggesting a pervasive evolutionary process [12], [17], [23].
In contrast, comparisons of select other geographically distant sites show much lower genetic divergence-LagBch and Point Loma sites (2.3% divergence, 107 km apart), PES and Santa Cruz sites (1.0% divergence, 47 km apart), and Dume and Cat sites (3.1% divergence, 68 km apart).
As expected, the nuclear fragment showed much lower levels of divergence due to the lower evolutionary rate of nuclear coding regions relative to mtDNA.
Phylogenetic support for orthologous gene replacements in GAS lies in the occurrence of alleles at a given locus comprising ≥2 discrete lineages, whereby within-lineage sequence divergence is much lower than the between-lineage divergence.
Usually, the degree of genetic divergence in documented cases of interspecific hybridization in insects never exceeds 5%-105%-10%ucleotidivergencence for protein-encoding mitochondrial genes [ 18- 20], which is much lower than the 25% divergence found between Acanthoscelides and Zabrotes.
Between pairs, divergence is so high that they only share a handful of genes, whereas within collinear pairs divergence is much lower and there are regions of complete identity.
However, what is clear from this table is that the nonsynonymous divergence (which is nowhere near saturation levels) is much lower than the rate of synonymous divergence, thus demonstrating functional constraint.
By contrast in A. madagascarensis and A. grandidieri, where only winged queens have been observed, within-species sequence divergences are much lower.
DNA barcoding is widely used for species determination because sequence divergences are generally much lower among individuals of a given species than among closely related species [ 29- 32].
