3.1 General inference
A total of 748 tissue samples were collected from Bangladesh coast, among which 376 COI sequences were obtained (Table 1). Based on morphological and molecular identifications, these samples represented 185 species of 146 genera, 74 families, 20 orders and two classes (Table 1). Among the 185 species, 21 fishes were new records in Bangladesh. The length of all barcode sequences ranged from 477 to 683 bp, with an average of 652 bp and 89% of sequences were longer than 600 bp. No stop codon, insertion, or deletion was observed in any of the obtained sequences. The lack of stop codons in these sequences indicates that they are functional mitochondrial COI sequences, together with the fact that each of the amplified sequences was about 658 bp in length. Hence, it suggests that Nuclear DNA Sequences Originating from Mitochondrial DNA Sequences (NUMTs) were not sequenced, as vertebrate NUMTS are typically less than 600 bp (Zhang & Hewitt 1996).