Mitochondrial DNA (Cytochrome c oxidase I) sequencing of Indian marine mussels

Abstract

Two species of marine mussels, the green mussel Perna viridis (Linnaeus, 1758) and the brown mussel Perna indica (Kuriakose and Nair, 1976) are found along the Indian coast. It had been suggested that P. indica, which occurs only along the Indian coast, is a synonym of the globally distributed Perna perna. Along the south-west coast of India, where both P. viridis and P. indica co-exist, a third type referred to as parrot mussel, which has shell shape of brown mussel and color of green mussel (suspected to be their hybrid/morphotype) also occurs. The present investigation is a preliminary attempt for resolving the taxonomic ambiguity among Indian marine mussel species using the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene. P. indica revealed 95% sequence similarity to P. perna. The sequence divergence between P. indica and parrot mussel was negligibly low (< 2%). Green mussel P. viridis showed 20.87% of sequence divergence with brown mussel P. indica as well as with the parrot mussel.