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Turkish Journal of Zoology

Abstract

Ostracods are diminutive aquatic invertebrates with a broad geographical distribution  across a diverse range of aquatic habitats, including lentic and lotic freshwater  environments as well as marine waters. Due to their sensitivity to environmental  changes, ostracods are valuable tools in biodiversity monitoring, providing a link to  past, present, and future ecological conditions. Despite the significance of classical  taxonomic studies in species identification, molecular approaches remain  underutilized in ostracod research, representing an area of potential growth for  advancing our understanding of this diverse group. Thus, molecular studies in  ostracods have the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of morphology,  ecological variation and adaptation, and species diversity. While adaptation through  morphological characters (e.g., carapace variation serving as a protective structure)  and form (e.g., size, shape, and mineral composition) vary in response to  environmental factors, molecular tools such as DNA sequence analyses can be  useful for exploring how ostracods thrive in different aquatic habitats and how they  speciated over time. In this study, we isolated total DNA and amplified 658 bp of the  cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene from nonmarine ostracod species collected from  Denizli Province, Türkiye. In addition, we included 5068 publicly available COI  sequences retrieved from NCBI. Our analyses provide a broader molecular  framework for examining evolutionary relationships, morphological congruence, and  ecological differentiation across ostracod lineages. The results emphasize the need  for more integrated studies that combine molecular, ecological, and morphological  data to improve species delimitation and understand habitat-driven divergence in this  underexplored group.

Author ORCID Identifier

SERDAR DİNÇ: 0000-0002-8920-2738

SERAP MUTUN: 0000-0002-0838-3857

OKAN KÜLKÖYLÜOĞLU: 0000-0003-4712-5612

DOI

10.55730/1300-0179.3252

Keywords

Ostracods, COI sequence data, freshwater, morphology, ecological preferences, phylogenetic analysis

First Page

69

Last Page

79

Publisher

The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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