Abstract
The evolution of parrotfish including Scarus species in the Red Sea is unclear. The true phylogenetic relations among these fishes have remained problematic especially between the closely related taxa. Developing of molecular markers could be applied for detecting biodiversity and understanding the evolution in these aquatic biological resources. In this study, the capability of 16S rRNA gene system in identification of some parrotfish species (Scarus fuscopurpureus, S. ghobban, S. ferrugineus S. psittacus and Chlorurus sordidus) comparatively with other fishes belonging to two families (labridae and scaridae) was established.
DNA polymorphism and sequence conservation values were calculated for overall estimated sites and for each evaluated 16s r-RNA gene fragment. The phylogenetic relations that were reconstructed among evaluated fishes showed that fishes were clustered into unique groups. One of them is including 10 fish species belonging to family scaridae. The other fish species (20 species) were belonging to the family labridae. This study could be preliminary for the next comprehensive investigation which takes more molecular techniques, especially at the nuclear DNA for reconstructing the true phylogenetic relations among the evaluated fish taxa.