Exploring Ornamental Fishes of Manipur through DNA Barcoding

DNA barcoding is an effective technique of species identification. The large reference library of DNA barcode should be enriched from every region and may be assessed together with morphological taxonomy for species authentication. In this study, a total of 27 fish samples belonging to 21 different species having ornamental relevance were collected and morphologically identified from Manipur, Northeast India. DNA was isolated from muscle tissue of samples and then COI barcode region was amplified using universal fish primers, sequenced and submitted to NCBI (Accession nos. JQ713844 - JQ713860). The sample sequences were identified through similarity search in two databases : GenBank and BOLD. Both the databases revealed definitive identity matches in the range of 98.37% - 100% for 44% of the species. This indicated that the database still lacks reference data of ornamental fishes of Manipur and this study contributed new barcode sequences of ornamental fishes.