Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Agriculture - Department of Genetics

Fish is one of the most important foods of the human because of its high nutritional content especially polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs omega-3 and omega-6) which are available in mullet species.The aims of this study was to show how the traditional, biochemical and molecular methods can be used to assess the genetic diversity among the four mullet species, namely Mugil cephalus, Liza ramada, Valamugil sihilil and Liza garana ,in addition to bioinformatics tools .The fish were collected from four different governorates in Egypt (Alexandria, Ismailia, Port Said and Damietta).The four species were morphologically characterized using seventeen morphometric characters.The ANOVA test showed that out of seventeen characters four morphometric characters (i.e., head length, distance of first dorsal fin, distance of second dorsal fin and body weight) showed significant differences (p<0.05) among the four species. While, the remaining morphometric characters revealed no significant differences (p0.05) among the species. The morphology-based dendrogram divided the four species into two main clusters.The first cluster was divided into two subclusters and comprised the ten genotypes.The second cluster contained the six remaining genotypes and was divided into two subclusters.Protein banding patterns using SDS-PAGE (protein electrophoresis) revealed the total number as 59 bands in the profiles of the four species. Liza garana (Port Said) showed the highest number of bands (18). While, the lowest number of protein bands showed in Valamugil sehili (Ismailia) was 10 bands. The dendrogram constructed using protein data was successful in clustering the species together

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