Identification of awaous guamensis and a. grammepomus based on morphology and molecular analysis

Abstract

Work on two freshwater Gobi fish species such as Awaous guamensis and A.
grammepomus was carried out on morphometric and meristic study for their
morphological identification. Sequence data of mitochondrial cytochrome
oxidase subunit I (COI) gene was used for this purpose. Around 620 bp
sequences were obtained when universal primers were used. An alignment was
performed between the sequences which showed some inter‐specific variation.
An entropy plot was generated for all the aligned positions which showed that
the entropy rarely touches a scale of one, which is a sign of better alignment in
the region. This work can be utilized for species identification, phylogenetic
analysis, to study molecular diversity and evolution, and most importantly for
the conservation of these fauna in near future.