Glyphis is a genus of extremely rare freshwater sharks, including the notorious Indian Gange “man-eater”. Because of its rarity, this genus of sharks only has been seen in museum collections for quite a long time. For some species, no more than fragments of skin tissues remain. Since 1990s, specimens of live glyphis have been “rediscovered” in Malaysia, Australia and Papua New Guinea by the scientific communities, but whether these specimens belong to the same species in the museum and how they relate to each other were all unknown.
The research team, spearheaded by Prof. Li Chenhong from College of Fisheries and Life Science, Shanghai Ocean University (SOU) developed target gene enrichment approach, overcame the difficulty in obtaining DNA sequence from long-preserved museum specimen and successfully determined the mitochondrial genome sequences from these samples. The results showed that the G. siamensis named 120 years ago is actually a synonym of G. gangeticus. They also found that the glyphis might have multiple transoceanic dispersals during its evolutionary time and thus are not strict freshwater species. The results were published online on journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/07/1508735112.abstract.
The study was conducted jointly by researchers from the Shanghai Ocean University, the College of Charleston of US, the University of Potsdam of Germany, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia, and Florida Fisheries Consultants Elasmobranch Studies. Professor Li of SOU is the first author of the paper. Prof. Li joined Shanghai Ocean University in August 2012 with sponsorship programs such as “Eastern Scholar” and “Shanghai Pujiang Program”. His research interests include phylogenetics and molecular ecology of fishes. He has published more than 30 SCI papers on high-end journals such as Systematic Biology and Molecular Ecology. He also serves as the editorial board member of the Journal of the World Aquaculture Society.
This is the first report of the presence of DGAT in Myrmecia incise, together with systematic bioinformatics analysis, functional verification, and substrate preference analysis. This work was under the guidance of Prof. Zhou Zhigang and jointly completed by Chen Chunxiu (master), Ouyang Linglong (postdoctoral) and Sun Zheng (Associate Researcher).