Molecular characterization of an indigenous barb Pethia manipurensis (Cyprinidae: Barbinae) from Manipur, India and its relationship with other cyprinid fishes inferring from mitochondrial cox1 gene sequences

Manipur is one of the north eastern states of India and it is rich in freshwater fish diversity. Among the small indigenous fishes of Manipur, Pethia manipurensis is an economically important fish having both food and ornamental value. For the taxonomic placement of this species among the cyprinid fishes, molecular characterization is conducted by using mitochondrial cox1 gene sequences. Partial sequences of mito. cox1 gene of thirty seven cyprinid species were down loaded from NCBI Genbank and the nucleotide sequence 602 bp were generated from two species i.e. Pethia manipurensis and Puntius sophore for present analysis. Here total 628 characters, 144, 459, 267 and 192 were conserved, variable, parsimony informative and singleton respectively. The average nucleotide frequencies are 26.4% (A), 29% (T), 26.4% (C), and 18.2% (G). The dendogram constructed by both Neighbour-Joining and Maximum Likelihood trees resulted in similar topologies with five clusters with eight sub-clusters which can indicate the taxonomic positions of Pethia manipurensis.