Molecular Identification of Aeromonas spp. Collected from Taif Province of Saudi Arabia

The current study has been conducted for amplifying and sequencing approximately 750 nucleotides from 16S nuclear ribosomal DNA gene in order to identify the available bacterial strains inhabiting the water bodies in wades of Taif region in Saudi Arabia. Blast program was searched for defining to which bacterial strain the obtained data belong. The sequences from very closely related taxa were, therefore, aligned manually with the target sequence and subjected to bioinformatics manipulation in order to construct their genetic relationship. Two statistical methods (maximum-parsimony-MP and neighbor-joining-NJ) were used to execute the most likely relationship. One hundred forty one nucleotides varied among the examined strains under parsimony criteria of which 69 were parsimony-informative and 72 were parsimony-uninformative. A single NJ tree was obtained with slight difference in topology with that obtained from maximum parsimony. Both trees agreed in their topology regarding the clustering of the available bacterial strains. The NJ tree supported the clustering of the current strain to A. veronii with strong bootstrap probability. The present study therefore revealed the possibility that the current identified strain could be A. veronii or a new species. More molecular data and taxon sampling are necessary to identify the current bacterial strain with high resolution