Negi R.K.¹ , Joshi Bheem Dutt^2,3 , Johnson J.A.² , Goyal S.P.²

1.Department of Zoology, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India
2.Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 248001, India
3.Department of Zoology & Environmental Sciences, Gurukula Kangri University, Haridwar, 249404, India
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Molecular Zoology, 2016, Vol. 6, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/ijmz.2016.06.0002
Received: 30 May, 2016    Accepted: 11 Jul., 2016    Published: 12 Oct., 2016

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Negi R.K., Joshi B.D., Johnson J.A., and Goyal S.P., 2016, Identifying Puntius Species Using DNA Barcodes: Implication in Wildlife Forensics, International Journal of Molecular Zoology, 6(2): 1-5 (doi: 10.5376/ijmz.2016.06.0002)

DNA-based species identification is a challenging in the case of deficiency of reference database for a particular species and presence of many false sequences in the online reference repository. Total of a 650 base pair of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene were sequenced from 10 samples each of Puntius chola and Puntius sophore from Uttarakhand, India. In NCBI data base, all samples were identified as the targeted species but some other sequences (n=3) which have been tagged as of different species were also found. We used four different DNA sequence based computational methods that allows the successful species identification where single method may lead misidentification. Therefore we propose use of different computational methods in assigning species identification to avoid false identification. These methods also enable us to identify the three sequence that was tagged as different species which was the actual sequence of the P. chola and P. sophore in the NCBI database.

Sequence divergence; Character attributes; Phylogenetic identification