Molecular identification and phylogeny of Nerita ̓s species on rocky shores of the Northern Persian Gulf

Neritas are among the most dominant groups of Gastropoda in the Persian Gulf. There is no previous study in relation to molecular and phylogeny of Neritas in the study area. The molecular identification of Nerita species have been studied for the first time in the northern rocky coastal zones of Persian Gulf during 2013 and 2014. After morphological identifications of species, DNA extraction, amplifying partial of cytochrome oxidase COI and 16S rRNA and sequencing procedure were done in the laboratory. In this study, 6 COI and 6 16S rRNA sequences, belonging to 3 species, were obtained. Also, phylogeny analyses with drawing phylogeny trees of Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian were done using MEGA6 and BEAST softwares. Morphological and molecular identification results were similar for 2 species and dissimilar for one species. This discrepancy shows that a combination of morphological and molecular studies is more reliable for species identification than either of them solely. The results also showed that Nerita species are monophyletic.