Mitochondrial COI barcoding of Scorpaena elongata(Cadenat, 1943): Intra genus investigation and theoritical protein profiling

Abstract

In the present study S.elongatafrom Parangipettai waters was sequenced for its 642 bp region of cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene to test its efficacy in identifying the species and also to demonstrate its intra species variations within the barcode region. The present study addresses this issue by examining the patterning of COI diversity in the subphylum Vertebrata, the most ancient and structurally diverse group of Family Scorpaenidae.The sequences were analyzed for their species identification using BOLDs identification engine. The BOLDs identification engine was also used to draw species level phylogenetic tree. The COI sequences of S.elongatafrom different geographical regions were extracted from NCBI for intraspecies variation analysis. All sequences were aligned using Clustal X. The sequences were trimmed in MEGA and phylogenetic tree was constructed with bootstrap test with 500 replicates. The barcode profiling studies clearly revealed that the barcode region of S.elongatafrom parangipettai waters hasequal amount of  cytosine and thymine content with 29.3 mol% whereas guanine content was found least with 18.5 Mol%. The results obtained in case of THEORITICAL barcode protein profiling, as the percentage of serinewas found higher as 14.46% and tryptophan with 0.62% as lowest in barcode proteins. Interesting while comparing COI nucleotide sequence of S.elongata is of low mol%from Parangipettai waters with other four fishes of same species from Spain, Mauritania and Greece.