Identification of Commercialized Turtle Samples through DNA Barcoding

The purpose of DNA barcodes for the rapid and accurate identification of wild species is one of the satisfactory and promising applications in forensic sciences. Here we developed eight 598 by sequences of COI (cytochrome c oxidase subunit I) locus for the accurate identification of commercialized turtle samples collected from different markets of East and Northeast India.The studied samples were successfully identified as two subspecies of Lissemys punctata, namely, L. p. andersoni and L. p. punctata with their limited morphometric data and sequence allignment results (99%-100% with L. punctata) in both BLASTn and BOLD IDs. Further, the studied sequences revealed less nucleotide (1.5%) and amino acid (0.5%) variationas as well as minimal K2P divergence (0% - 1.5%) in both L. p. andersoni and L. p. punctata. Partial barcode sequences are not efficient to delineate the subspecies of L. punctata. This study validated that the use of partial COI marker could overcome the lack of mophometric data to achieve higher accuracy detection of any commercialized as well as forensic samples.