ИСТИНА

White Sea Biological Station of the Moscow State University is an educational and research center, established for conducting research in marine biology and for summer field courses in invertebrate zoology, as well as in other biological disciplines. Research on the White Sea fauna have been conducted on the station during the last 60 years. As a result of these studies, the catalog of White Sea Biota and the Atlas of White Sea flora and fauna has been published. Deep knowledge of current marine fauna of the region provide an advantage in applying molecular tools and to compare the result with the data based on classical morphology methods. Molecular genetic lab at WSBS was established in 2008 for providing support for summer courses in molecular genetics and for conducting DNA research. From 2011 lab was equipped with full cycle DNA barcoding equipment, including ABI3500 sequencing machine. The DNA-barcoding project of the White Sea biodiversity was started in 2010. Now we have collection of local marine fauna preserved in 96% alcohol consisting of more than 2000 samples. For most taxa, at least 5 specimens of each species are identified by classical taxonomy and designated as vouchers for further DNA analysis. DNA-barcoding consists in sequencing of the Folmer fragment of COI gene. Additionally we intend to obtain sequences for at least one nuclear gene (fragment of histone H3 or 28S RNA coding genes). More extensive research, involved larger sample size and use sequencing of additional genes was done for species, for which we observed discrepancy between data obtained by molecular-genetic and from classical taxonomy methods. We will present our preliminary results of genetic revision of Kandalaksha Bay invertebrate fauna: revealing of numerous sibling species and cases of mitochondrial introgression.