Use of DNA barcoding in the assignment of commercially valuable fish species from Romania

Abstract

DNA barcoding is a molecular technique frequently used either for biodiversity monitoring and fish conservation or in the identification of the species of origin for raw and processed food from restaurants or fish markets. The most important aspect of this technique is that it works for all stages of life and can be used to distinguish between closely related taxa. Also, the technique has been used to unmask attempts of frauds in fish markets where more desirable and expensive fish are sometimes substituted with lower valued species. Our study aims to test the utility of the COI barcoding gene in the correct identification of several economically and ecologically valuable fish species, and interspecies hybrids, from Romanian wild fauna, aquaculture and fish markets. By combining the 122 COI sequences generated here with additional barcodes downloaded from GenBank and BOLD we screened several members of Acipenseriformes and Salmoniformes. While COI was able to correctly classify the majority of Salmoniformes, the identification process for Acipenseriformes proved more difficult, especially in the case of hybrids. Although the results show that DNA barcodes present a low degree of interspecies variation making classification possible only at the genus level, this technique is still relatively cheap, fast, and useful in the identification of incorrectly labelled market products.

Alien fish, amphibian and reptile species in Romania and their invasive status: a review with new data

“…A. baerii has also escaped in the Middle Danube region, being present in free waters of Hungary (Weiperth et al 2013) and has already hybridized with the native species Acipenser ruthenus (Ludwig et al 2009). Hybrids of Acipenser baerii and Acipenser gueldenstaedtii are also kept in aquaculture in Romania (Popa et al 2017).…”

A Multistep DNA-Based Methodology for Accurate Authentication of Sturgeon Species

“…Here, it is useful only for maternal species detection. It was also highlighted that some mitochondrial markers do not differentiate between the closely related species of the “ gueldenstaedtii complex” [ 26 , 27 ]. Thus, in recent years the studies on sturgeon species identification have been focusing on bi-parentally inherited nuclear markers with the aim of detecting hybrids.…”

DNA barcoding identification of Perciform fishes of the Arabian Gulf commercially harvested in Qatar

“…Since it was developed by Hebert et al (2003) the DNA, barcoding technique has been used for the identification of both marine and freshwater fish species in many countries and regions across the world (Ardura et al, 2010;Zhang, 2011;Mabragana et al, 2011;Abbas et al, 2017;Popa et al, 2017;Bingpeng et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018;Kundu et al, 2019;Panpromminet al, 2019). The success of identifying fishes with mtDNA CO1 gene barcode ranged from 93 to 100% (Ivanova et al, 2007;Hubert et al, 2008;Steinke et al, 2009).…”