| Brine shrimp or Artemia (Crustacea, Anostraca) lives in hypersaline environments, such as salt lakes and lagoons with a worldwide distribution. They are used for biodiversity studies in inland hypersaline lakes because they show enormous diversity at the genus level in terms of their ability to survive under different ionic compositions, climatic conditions, and altitude. In addition, these morphological variations should provide excellent material for studying adaptive genetic polymorphisms at the molecular level. During the past two decades the phylogenetic relationships between Artemia species have been established by combined studies based on crossbreeding, morphological differentiation, cytogenetics, and allozyme markers as well as other nuclear and mitochondrial (mitDNA) DNA sequence markers.We report the use of DNA barcoding to analyze the phylogenetic relationships among Artemia obtained from different habitats around the world using samples maintained at the Laboratory of Aquaculture & Artemia Reference Center (ARC), Gent, Belgium. A 648-bp segment of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COXI) was chosen as a standard barcode region to establish the polygenetic relationship among Artemia species. The initial study focused on the plateau regions in China, particularly the isolated salt lakes in the Tibetan Plateau. We also investigated population diversity among the isolated salt lakes as well as the evolutionary relationship between populations in the Himalayas. We also found the phenomenon of insertion and deletion (Indel) happening in the position of 381bp within COXI gene from the Artemia in Co Qen Lake of Tibet.Combining the Barcoding analysis, we sequenced the mitochondrial genome of one Tibetan Artemia. According to the comparative analysis of 13 coding genes in mitochondrial genome between the Tibetan Artemia and A.franciscana, we confirmed the stability and reliability of the application of DNA Barcoding in the phylogenetic analysis. |
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