Abstract
The fishes, which have currently named Aphanius Nardo, 1827 are the relict of the ancient ichthyofauna of the Tethys Sea. For a long time since 1827, the genus name has been subjected to revision by several researchers using mainly morphological features. Until recently, no comprehensive single- or multi-locus DNA barcoding study has been conducted on whole members of the family Aphaniidae. In the present study, by applying four conceptually different molecular species delimitation methods, including one distance-based method, one network-based and two topology-based methods, we examined a single-locus DNA barcode library (COI) diversity for the 268 sequences within the family Aphaniidae from the Old World (57 sequences are new in the present study and 211 sequences were retrieved from NCBI database). The molecular analyses revealed a clearer picture of intra-family relationships and allowed us to clarify the generic names, and also describe a new genus for the family Aphaniidae. Results supported distinction of three major clades related to three genera within this family: i) the first clade includes the A. mento group which are placed in a new genus, Paraphanius gen. nov., found in the Orontes (= Asi) and Tigris-Euphrates River drainage, the Levant in coastal waters and the Dead Sea basin, western Jordan, and in southern Turkey in the Mediterranean basins as well as in central Turkey. This clade positioned at the base of the phylogenetic tree, (ii) the second clade contains the A. dispar-like brackish water tooth-carps which are transferred to the genus Aphaniops Hoedeman, 1951 (type species, Lebias dispar), distributed in the coastal waters around the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf basins; and (iii) the third clade, the genus Aphanius Nardo, 1827 (type species Aphanius nanus = A. fasciatus) contains all the inland and inland-related tooth-carps, which are mainly distributed in the inland waters in Turkey and Iran and also in the inland-related drainages around the Mediterranean basin.
Highlights
Morphological characters have long been used to describe and identify fish species
The clade formed by A. pluristriatus A. kavirensis, A. sophiae, Aphanius sp. and A. mesopotamicus is plagued with very low levels of interspecific sequence divergence (S1 Table), and low values of posterior probabilities and bootstraps (Fig 2)
By applying a c oxidase I (COI) barcode library for the tooth-carps fishes of the Old World, we conducted an array of molecular species delimitation analyses (i.e., Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery (ABGD) [100], Statistical Parsimony (SP) [102], Bayesian Poisson Tree Process (bPTP) [104], and Bayesian General Mixed Yule-Coalescent (bGMYC) [105]) to investigate species boundaries and to compared the results to existing morphology-based taxonomy
Summary
It is known that traditional methods based on morphological properties often do not allow the discovery of cryptic species, frequently leading to taxon misidentification, instability in the number of species and an insufficient indication of the loss of genetic diversity. DNA barcoding based on the partial nucleotide sequences of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene has been increasingly used as one of the principal approaches in the bio-identification system of animals [3]. Almost all species can be distinguished by their COI sequences only if the average intraspecific and interspecific genetic distances are significantly different (barcoding gap) [4, 5]. The most important benefits of DNA barcoding are its accuracy to distinguish closely related species, identifying individuals at different developmental stages, discovering cryptic species and to identify the possible causes of synonymies. Over recent decades, this technology has had a principal contribution to the reliable identification of species [6, 7]
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