USEFULNESS OF DNA BARCODES IN THE PHYLOGENY AND SPECIES IDENTIFICATION OF Hypostomus (SILURIFORMES: LORICARIIDAE)

YAMILA CARDOSO; EVA RUEDA ; FLORENCIA BRANCOLINI ; ARIEL PARACAMPO; MARTA LIZARRALDE

San Juan

Congreso; SECOND JOINT MEETING OF THE BIOLOGY SOCIETIES FROM ARGENTINA; 2011

Sociedad Argentina de Biología

The Loricariidae family is one of the most diverse in number of genera and species in the Neotropical Region. The genus Hypostomus includes approximately 130 species that inhabit a variety of environments reaching much of this region. The wide distribution, species richness and the limited available information of Hypostomus became this genus difficult to taxonomic determination. In this sense the molecular tools allow a new focus on the systematics. Here, we analyzed the species diversity of Hypostomus through DNA barcodes. Sequences of the D-loop marker, whose phylogenetic information has already been checked, has been used as a control. We amplified 876bp of DNA barcodes and 547bp of D-loop markers and rebuilt the phylogeny of Hypostomus from each dataset. The topology of the obtained trees has been the same for both genes and the specimens of each species have differentiated by a considerable genetic distance in both cases. Thus, we demonstrated that DNA barcodes are a great tool in the species identification of Hypostomus, but it also contains information about the evolutionary history of the genus.