Abstract

DNA barcoding is a widely used molecular approach for species cataloging for unambiguous identification and conservation. In the present study, DNA barcoding of some West African mammals were performed with six new mitochondrial CO1 sequences for Civettictis civetta, Tadarida nigeriae, Orycteropus afer, Heliosciurus gambianus, Equus africanus asinus  and Funisciurus anerythrus  which are absent in public databases such as BLAST/NCBI and BOLD. Sequence identifications were made by comparing unknown sequences against the DNA barcodes of known species through distance-based tree construction and alignment probing. The sequences have been deposited to GenBank/NCBI.

Key words: mtDNA, West African mammals, conservation, biodiversity.