DNA Barcoding of Common Commercial Sea Catfish (Genus: Plicofollis) from Kuwait

Abstract

Kuwait fish market is one of the richest markets of native marine fish species. Sea catfishes are not very important in economic point of view, and only few of them (four species) are present and mistakenly, they all named (Chem). Using DNA barcode technique, the common sea catfish present in the East major fish market (Sharq) was analyzed. Based on the most common species ID databases (Barcoding of life database, BOLD and NCBI database), the most proposal identification that is compatible with major survey in 1997, the sea catfish is Plicofollis tenuispinis, the thin-spin sea catfish with similarity 100% and phylogenetic support of 78% bootstrap value. This is the first application of DNA barcode technique to thin-spine sea catfish of Kuwait.