Taha Al-Khafaji; Mustafa S.F. Ziyadi; Marwa K. Musad
Abstract
During the last decade, tilapia species (Cichlidae: Teleostei) becamemembers of Iraqi fish fauna. They characterized with morphological similarity amonggenera and species. That makes ...
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During the last decade, tilapia species (Cichlidae: Teleostei) becamemembers of Iraqi fish fauna. They characterized with morphological similarity amonggenera and species. That makes species differentiation not easily. Molecular methodsfollowed to differentiate between redbelly tilapia Coptodon zillii (Gervais, 1848) andblue tilapia Oreochromis aureus (Steindachner, 1864) of the Euphrates River sectorat Al-Samawah city. RAPD-PCR method used to create the genetic fingerprints of twotilapia fish species. Seven decamer primers (OPA08, OPA10, OPA13, OPA17,OPA19, OPB08 and OPC02) used to amplify DNA fragments using PCR-RAPDtechnique. Forty-four bands scored after electrophoresis on 2% agarose gel alongwith molecular marker fragmented to each 100 base pair. The molecular weight ofbands was calculated using PhotoCapt-MW software. The volume of bands rangedfrom C. zillii 168 bp to 2227 bp while they ranged from 62 bp to 2154 bp in O.aureus. The results achieve the RAPD fingerprints of two tilapia species in EuphratesRiver at for genetic Al-Samawa city and draw the genetic tree with the same speciesfrom Shatt A-Arab River in Basrah city. The study concluded that there is the closestrelatedness among tilapia populations from Euphrates and Shatt Al-Arab Rivers. Theresults proved that RAPD markers were efficient to generate DNA fingerprints oftilapia fish species. Furthermore, the utilizing of the RAPD markers can differentiatethe two studied species. The present study may be the first genetic study on thesetilapia fish species. Moreover, this would be the baseline studies in the future. Inaddition, this study would be valuable for conservation program and documentationof identities of tilapia fish species in Iraqi inland waters
