BASED ON 16S ARN MITOCHONDRIAL GENES**

Abstract

Abstract: The vertebrate mitochondrial genome has been an important model system for studying molecular evolution, organismal phylogeny, and genome structure. Phylogenetic relatioships were inferred from analysis of 570 base pairs (bp) of mithocondrial DNA (mtDNA), representing a conserved region of 16S rRNA. We sequenced 13 cyprinids species and one putative outgroup (Misgurnus fossilis) from Romania. Based upon nucleotide sequence comparisons of cyprinid mitochondrial 16SRNA genes, we established the phylogenetic relationships between analyzed species. The phylogenetic trees obtained by two different methods (neighbor-joining and maximum parsimony) have the same topology and show that most species examined have supported the traditional division of the Cyprinidae into two subfamilies: Cyprininae and Leuciscinae