Preliminary Study on the Molecular Identification of Copepod Eggs in Xiamen Bay

In this research several copepod freshly spawned eggs and resting eggs were identified and analyzed in Xiamen Bay,based on an established method of fast identify copepod eggs in sediments.DNA barcoding is an alternative approach to identify copepod species and improve the accuracy in analyzing copepod samples.The partial 28S rRNA(～300 bp) sequence was valid in copepod species identification,and the sequence was used to constructed a Neighbor-Joining tree which showed that freshly spawned eggs and resting eggs of copepod in Xiamen Bay can be accurately identified by this method,and the similarity rate of sequences ≥98% and ≥95% represented the same species and the same genera respectively.This method can be widely applied in copepod egg banks studies for identifying copepod species and their composition and distribution.