Character-based Diagnostic Keys, Molecular Identification and Phylogenetic Relationships of Fishes based on Mitochondrial Gene from Pulicat Lake, India: A Tool for Conservation and Fishery Management Purposes

Abstract

Background: Pulicat Lake is one of India’s most valuable ecosystems. Correct species identification is essential for the conservation and management of finite resources. Molecular signatures and character-based keys could be used for faster identification. This will be a powerful tool to obtain a significant amount of accurate information quickly and conveniently and could be used for forensic applications and the conservation of fish in Indian waters. Methods: In addition to morphological identification, the species were identified using various approaches, such as Neighbour-joining (NJ), Maximum Likelihood (ML) trees and the Character-based method. For each species, the LOGic (BLOG 2.0) DNA Barcode analysis method was used to identify different positions of key diagnostic nucleotides in a given set. Result: DNA barcodes were generated from twenty-nine species of fish representing seven orders, 26 genera and 21 families in this study. The current study’s findings show that the 16S rRNA barcodes facilitated successful fish species identification and also provided phylogenetic information to differentiate the fishes. The character-based molecular diagnostic keys for fishes were also developed in-silico from the data set comprising 393 mitochondrial 16S rRNA sequences including the sequences generated in the present study and other published resources.