The central region of the East/Japan Sea is the place where East Korea Warm Current, a branch of the Tsushima current, and North Korea Cold Current collide each other. This boundary exhibits a high productivity and is considered as a good fishing grounds for commercially important fish species including pacific cod, mackerels, walleye pollock etc. High amount of ichthyoplankton is transported according to those currents and the correlation between the amount of their catch and the spatiotemporal distribution of their larvae is still not clearly established. However, traditional surveys dependent on the morphological identification required a lot of times, labors, and cost. In order to overcome those difficulty, we designed a piscine-specific universal primers, which exhibit both high specificity to fish species and wide species coverage. The reliability of the universal primers were examined by the MiSeq platform using the plankton net samples collected from the coastal waters of East/Japan Sea between January and June in 2016.
Results/Conclusions
PCR amplification was conducted to test for primer reliability. We successfully amplified using designed fish specific primers from 51 individual fish samples (50 Genera, 37 Families and 14 Orders). As the result of next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis, we obtained total 1,002,387 contigs. After sequence similarity analysis, we were able to identify 86, 102, 165, 68, 256 and 145 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) in each month (from January to June), which present 28 fish species. Dominant species were pacific sandlance (Ammodytes personatus) in January, pacific sandlance (Ammodytes personatus) in February and March, yellow striped flounder (Pseudopleuronectes herzensteini) and japanese anchovy (Engraulis japonicus). From May to June, japanese anchovy (Engraulis japonicus) was dominated. Stout eelblenny (Anisarchus medius), Reinhardtius sp., which are not found in Korean water, were also identified. Considering high amount of sub-tropical species including dotted gizzard shad (Konosirus punctatus) and blue mackerel (Scomber australasicus) in East/Japan Sea, a long-term survey should be conducted to know the changes of their spatiotemporal distribution by the climate change.