LAUSR

ABSTRACT Illegal trade in pangolins are generally in the form of carcasses, flour, scales, embryos, blood and bones. Therefore, physical tracking and identification are difficult so molecular analysis is needed to identify the specimen precisely. Investigations in the illegal trade of wildlife have benefited greatly from the advancement of DNA forensic techniques. Here, I reconstructed phylogenetic trees from the neighbor-joining analyses based on the CO1 gene sequences from the confiscated carcasses of pangolins. The genetic distance matrix calculations with the Kimura Two-parameter model (K2P) were implemented in the pairwise distance calculation in the Mega (Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis) program version 6.05. I included total 77 sequences of pangolins from confiscated and 92 sequences from GenBank (Manis javanica, Manis sp., Manis pentadactyla, Manis culionensis, Phataginus tricuspis, Phataginus tetradactyla, Smutsia temminckii, and Smutsia gigantea). The results of phylogenetic analysis revealed two clades of Asia and Africa with a genetic distance of 23.85±2.38% and all pangolin haplotypes confiscated identified as a species of Manis javanica. The genetic distance between Manis javanica and Manis culionensis was 3.9 ±0.89%, which it was a sister clade and the farthest genetic distance between Manis culionensis and Smutsia temmickii was 23.19±2.14%. The phylogenetic tree shows the monophyletic clade of pangolins species in the world. Phylogenetic relationships between haplotypes from Manis javanica were confiscated separately into two subclades, namely subclade A1 (19 haplotypes) and A2 (12 haplotypes). The genetic distance in subclade A1 averaged were 0.59±0.14% and subclade A2 were 1.01±0.24%, whereas it was 3.09 ± 0.64% between subclades A1 and A2. Total there were 31 haplotypes showing Manis javanica originating from a different habitat with a wide distribution. Keywords: Illegal trade, pangolin, gene barcode