Abstract

• A total of thirteen fish samples of Anabas testudineus were collected from four different geographical sites, Maubin, Sittwe, Dawei and Kalay of Myanmar, to examine the morphology and molecular genetics during the study period of December 2019 to August 2020. In the present study, the 15 morphometric variable characteristics were recorded for all Anabas specimens. The largest total length of 17cm was observed for the species of Maubin and the smallest of 8.5cm for that of Sittwe. The dorsal fin had 16 to 18 strong spines and 8 to 10 soft rays inserted over or slightly in advance of the pectoral fins; the anal fin was with 8 to 11 spines and 9 to 11 soft rays. The body weight was the highest, 82.10g, in Maubin and the lowest is 11.26g in Sittwe. Extraction of high-quality and quantity DNA was conducted, that was a fundamental requirement for genetic research. The highest quality of DNA from fish samples (value of A260/A280 was 2.02) from Sittwe, and the lowest quality (value of A260/A280 was 1.74) from Maubin were obtained. The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) genes were amplified using PCR reaction. A product ~700 bp length was obtained. After the sequencing, a total 4 haplotypes with 2 variable sites, haplotype diversity of 0.67 and nucleotide diversity of 0.32%, were noted for CO1 gene (615 bp, n=4) dataset of the studied species. Genetic distance ranged from 0.0016 to 0.0032% among four samples of Anabas testudineus for CO1 gene. In Neighbor-joinging (NJ) and Maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree analyses, all four samples of native Myanmar Anabas testudineus clustered into a strong single cluster for all datasets. Inferred ancestral sequences tree was constructed using CO1: AS, AD, AM1 and AK among sites treated as being uniform G nucleotide.