Abstract
The present study reports the morphological and molecular characterization of marine neogastropods collected from the South-East to the South-West coasts of Bangladesh. A total of 21 species under 13 families were identified morphologically, of which 7 species were barcoded successfully using partial sequence of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit-I (COI) gene. The average nucleotide frequencies of these species were G (guanine) = 20.57%, C (cytosine) = 18.44%, A (adenine) = 23.65%, T (thymine) = 37.35% and the GC content was 39.01%. The average Kimura two-parameter (K2P) distances of the COI barcode sequences within species, genera, and families were 20.7%, 22.0%, and 22.0%, respectively. The average inter-species genetic divergence was calculated as 21.0%. In addition, the COI barcode sequence of Nassarius stolatus was identified and submitted to the GenBank for the first time. The study also reports the new record of a species, Indothais rufotincta Tan & Sigurdsson, 1996 from Bangladesh. This finding greatly extends the distributional range of this species from the West coast to the East coast of the Bay of Bengal. J. Bio-Sci. 29(1): 79-91, 2021 (June)
Highlights
Gastropoda, the most diversified class of Mollusca, with more than 100,000 extant species, constitutes 80% of all molluscs (Haszprunar and Wanninger 2012), of which marine gastropods comprise approximately 60,000 shelled gastropods and 13,000 sea slugs (Geiger 2006)
A total of 21 species of neogastropods were identified morpho-meristically (Figs. 1-3), which belonged to 17 genera and 13 families viz. Muricidae, Clavatulidae, Volutidae, Babyloniidae, Melongenidae, Nassariidae, Conidae, Olividae, Ancillariidae, Harpidae, Pisaniidae, Columbellidae and Architectonicidae
The diversity of these cytochrome oxidase subunit-I (COI) barcode sequences was reasonably sufficient to discriminate the species within a genus which strongly validated the efficiency of COI barcodes for identifying neogastropod species
Summary
Gastropoda, the most diversified class of Mollusca, with more than 100,000 extant species, constitutes 80% of all molluscs (Haszprunar and Wanninger 2012), of which marine gastropods comprise approximately 60,000 shelled gastropods and 13,000 sea slugs (Geiger 2006). According to Siddiqui et al (2007), 318 species of gastropods are recorded from Bangladesh territory, of which 282 marine, 16 freshwater and 20 terrestrial. Wahab et al (2012) mentioned that 26 freshwater and 336 marine gastropods are found in Bangladesh. Accurate identification of molluscan species is sometimes difficult due to their extensive diversity in morphological features. Phenotypic plasticity results in changes in shell morphology, leading to the development of synonyms and homonyms of species, which necessitates molecular characterization (Altaf et al 2017). DNA barcoding is recognized as a quick and reliable method for species identification (Herbert et al 2003) and has been widely used, especially for disclosing cryptic species (Johnson et al 2008, Weigt et al 2012)
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