Molecular Forensics of Indian Wildlife: Species Identification through COI Gene Barcoding and Bioinformatics Analysis

In wildlife forensics, precise species identification is essential, particularly in cases involving poaching, illegal wildlifetrade, and biodiversity conservation. Molecular technologies are necessary for accurate forensic analysis since traditionalmorphological methods frequently fail when biological specimens are processed, incomplete, or degraded. MitochondrialDNA (mtDNA) has proven particularly useful in these situations because of its large copy number, maternal mode ofinheritance, and increased stability in damaged tissues. The cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene is one of the mostcommonly used mtDNA markers for DNA barcoding due to its high interspecies variability, evolutionary conservation,and inclusion in extensive international databases.This study examined the COI gene sequences of ten often encountered domestic and wild Indian species: Elephas maximus(elephant), Bos gaurus (gaur), Bos taurus (domestic cow), Axis axis (chital), Axis porcinus (hog deer), Macaca mulatta (rhesusmacaque), Pavo cristatus (Indian peacock), Sus scrofa (wild boar), and Panthera tigris (tiger) and Panthera pardus (leopard).COI sequences that are publicly accessible were obtained from NCBI GenBank database. BLAST was used for sequencevalidation, and Clustal Omega was used for multiple sequence alignment. Using MEGA12, a neighbor-joining tree wasconstructed and pairwise distance analysis was performed to evaluate genetic distance and phylogenetic relationships.Significant genetic divergence was found among the species under study, and the phylogenetic tree showed groupingpatterns that aligned with established taxonomic relationships. These results demonstrate that COI-based DNA barcodingis a reliable method for differentiating between closely related species.