DNA Barcoding of Catfish: Species Authentication and Phylogenetic Assessment

Abstract

As the global market for fisheries and aquaculture products expands, mislabeling of these products has become a growing concern in the food safety arena. Molecular species identification techniques hold the potential for rapid, accurate assessment of proper labeling. Here we developed and evaluated DNA barcodes for use in differentiating United States domestic and imported catfish species. First, we sequenced 651 base-pair barcodes from the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene from individuals of 9 species (and an Ictalurid hybrid) of domestic and imported catfish in accordance with standard DNA barcoding protocols. These included domestic Ictalurid catfish, and representative imported species from the families of Clariidae and Pangasiidae. Alignment of individual sequences from within a given species revealed highly consistent barcodes (98% similarity on average). These alignments allowed the development and analyses of consensus barcode sequences for each species and comparison with limited sequences in public databases (GenBank and Barcode of Life Data Systems). Validation tests carried out in blinded studies and with commercially purchased catfish samples (both frozen and fresh) revealed the reliability of DNA barcoding for differentiating between these catfish species. The developed protocols and consensus barcodes are valuable resources as increasing market and governmental scrutiny is placed on catfish and other fisheries and aquaculture products labeling in the United States.

DNA barcoding reflects the diversity and variety of brooding traits of fish species in the family Syngnathidae along China’s coast

“…This result likely reflects mislabelling in GenBank, as these two species are morphologically (and genetically) similar. A similar situation was previously documented for the two catfishes Clarias macrocephalus and C. batrachus (Wong et al, 2011). BOLD-IDS validates its identification search only if the species in the reference database has at least three barcoded specimens and identifies the query sequences if it matches the reference sequence within the conspecific distance of less than 1% (Ratnasingham and Hebert, 2007).…”

Forensic reconstruction ofIctalurus punctatusinvasion routes using on-line fishermen records

“…GenBank Accession nos. JF292392-JF292380; Wong et al, 2011). Other Ictalurus species' entries showed a lower sequence similarity (<94%) for the same level of query coverage (i.e.…”

DNA barcoding for the identification of common economic aquatic products in Central China and its application for the supervision of the market trade

“…Many DNA barcoding researches has demonstrated that COI contains sufficient variation to accurately identify a large variety of animals, including both freshwater (Hubert et al 2008) and marine aquatic organisms ( Rock et al 2008;Spies, Gaichas, Stevenson, Orr, & Canino, 2006;Ward, Holmes, White, & Last, 2008;Ward, Zemlak, Innes, Last, & Hebert, 2005), to the species level (Waugh, 2007). Especially, COI gene barcoding has provided numerous successful examples demonstrating its reliability for the identification of fish, such as tuna (Lowenstein et al 2010;Terol, Mascarell, Fernandez-Pedrosa, & Perez-Alonso, 2002), flatfish (Espineira, Gonzalez-Lavin, Vieites, & Santaclara, 2008;Terol et al 2002), anchovy (Jerome et al 2008), and catfish (Wong et al 2011), as well as other economic aquatic species (Ardura, Linde, Moreira, & Garcia-Vazquez, 2010;Galal-Khallaf et al 2014). At present, the barcoding of common economic aquatic products has become increasingly important in the supervision of the market trade (Carvalho et al 2011).…”