ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Research Article | Open Access

Mohammed Ali Alshehri1,2, Al Thabiani Aziz1, Othman Alzahrani1,2, Abdulrahman Alasmari1, Shafik Ibrahim3, Gamal Osman3,4 and Omar Bahattab1

1Biology Department, Faculty of Science, University of Tabuk, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
2Genome and Biotechnology Unit, Faculty of Sciences, University of Tabuk, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
3Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI), Agriculture Research Center (ARC), Giza, Egypt.
4Department of Biology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
J. Pure Appl. Microbiol., 2019, 13 (4): 2035-2044 | Article Number: 5923
https://doi.org/10.22207/JPAM.13.4.15 | © The Author(s). 2019
Received: 21/09/2019 | Accepted: 30/10/2019 | Published: 05/12/2019
Abstract

Among the different biological sources, seaweeds have lot of biotechnological applications. Saudi Arabia is bounded by three bodies of water. With a coastal border of almost 1,800 km. This area high species richness caused by its complex geological history has encompassed genetic and morphological diversity studies for decades. The DNA-barcoding using rbcL gene has proved its usefulness in studying seaweeds phylogenetic diversity, multiple cryptic introductions, environmental modulation the geographical distribution and species identification in different seaweed species. Eight algae samples were collected from different locations in Saudi Arabia. The rbcL gene was used through PCR protocol for species identification. A total number of 8 sequences were obtained with a total sequence length of 5263 bp. where it ranged from 610 to 753 with an average length of 658 bp. The species identification revealed that the specimens samples 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 belongs to Padina pavonica, Turbinaria gracilis, Carpomitra costata, Pterocladiella capillacea, Cladostephus spongiosus, Ulva lactuca, Sporochnus comosus and Sargassum muticum respectively. The rbcL-based DNA bar-coding was almost successful to identify different seaweeds specimens according to species and genus. Some specimens rbcL was not adequate to identify genus level and failed to differentiate between highly similar species. We suggest to use more DNA barcoding techniques in addition to rbcL to ad more resolution to the species identification.

Keywords

Seaweeds, Saudi Arabia, rbcL, species identification, geographical distribution.

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© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.