Genomic evidence affirms that the Burnished brass siblings Diachrysia chrysitis and D. stenochrysis (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae) are distinct species
In this study, we employed genomic methods to study a a pair of species with virtually identical appearance and problematic taxonomy from the family Noctuidae namely Burnished Brass Diachrysia chrysitis and D. stenochrysis. However, the ranges of the two putative species largely overlap, and their females are shown to release chemically different sexual pheromones to attract males. Due to the presence of two wing pattern forms, we wanted to study whether these species can be reliably separated by molecular approaches such as Target Enrichment.For the analysis we used 21 Ingroup taxa. We targeted the genomic regions of interest mainly exons and flanking introns. This method has an advantage since the targeted loci are fixed and are known to have low missing data.