Abstract: To prevent illegal fishing and sale, the most difficult problem is identification of marketed fish species, especially the parts that are difficult to be differentiated with morphological method (e.g., larval, eggs, scales, meat, products etc. To assist conservation and management of fishery resources, this paper reported a molecular genetic approach based on ribosomal internal transcribed spacer 2 locus. The method includes two steps: (1) the order general primers were designed according to the conservative nature of 5.8SrRAN and 28SrRNA genes within an order, and the DNA ribosomal internal transcribed spacer 2 locus fragment were then amplified and sequenced. (2) The species-specific ladders and the species-specific primers for each species were designed according to the sequencing results. The map of molecular taxonomy was constructed. This approach employs multiplex PCR that is formatted for fish species identification. We tested 210 sin-gle-species samples and 40 mix-species samples from different regions of China. The approach distinguished accurately and sensitively samples from each of the five species. This genetic and molecular approach will be useful for fish conservation, assessment, management and exploitation, strengthen in law enforcement of fishery manager, combat rare and endangered fish smuggling, and prevent commercial fraud and biological invasion by harmful nonnative species.

Key words: fish, internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2), molecular taxonomy, species identification, resources conservation