Abstract
The present work aims to genetic fingerprinting of some Hard fish with different colors in Red Sea, Saudi Arabia and determined harbor pathogenic bacteria associated with Hard fish, which are part of the natural micro-flora of the environment. Fifteen individual fish samples were molecular characterized using ten RAPD markers. An in-vitro assay was carried out to ascertain and identify major bacterial contaminants of harid fish and molecular identification of these bacteria using 16S rDNA gene sequencing was achieved. RAPD marker produced 144 distinct bands, 62.5% were considered as polymorphic bands and 37.5% were considered as monomorphic bands. The resulting dendergram produced two large clusters of around 48% genetic similarity. In vitro assay result revealed that the samples were predominantly contaminated by different bacteria species viz: Klebsiella species, Citrobacter freundii, Enterobacter species and Pantoea agglomerans. Incidences of the various isolates in the culture were found to be 45, 30, 20 and 5%, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis of the partial 16S rDNA sequences of bacterial strains were divided them into five species with similarity value ranging from 96 to 99 % as compared with bacterial sequences in NCBI database. To the best of our knowledge this work is breaking new ground on genetic fingerprinting of Hard fish in Saudi Arabia using RAPD technique. Our results indicated that the presence of sufficient nuclear DNA level variations among the different Hard fish phenotypic color using RAPD technique.