Preliminary Study To Detect Conspecific Brood Parasitism Of Common Coot(Fulica Atra) By Mitochondrial Cytb Gene

Conspecific brood parasitism (CBP), which definition is females lay eggs in nests of other female individuals, is common in birds. Common Coot (Fulica atra), a waterbird of Raliidae, has been reported to the behavior of CBP. The important basis to studying biological mechanism of CBP is to detect and identify parasitic eggs. There are some ecological methods detecting parasitic eggs:supernormal clutch-size, daily nest monitoring and egg morphology et al. Due to the little difference among eggs of the conspecific individuals, the accuracy of these methods are still need to be tested by more experiments. Though there are studies about detecting CBP by molecular biology methods in recent years, all these methods need both biomaterials of high quality and accomplishing large amounts of basic experiments in advance, which can’t be applied to DNA samples of Common Coot obtained by non-destructive method. Can a molecular biology method detect parasitic eggs quickly? We proposed a detecting strategy based on Cytb gene of Common Coot. In May2013, we collected eggs from two deserted nests when monitoring CBP of Common Coot in Daqing Wetland, Heilongjiang province and analyzed the eggs by genetics experiments. The results showed that:1. We amplified the mitochondrial Cytb gene of Common Coot the first time, which length is1143bp, coding polypeptide of381amino acids.2. There are major difference in bases and amino acids of Cytb gene between Common Coot and American Coot(Fulica americana).3. There are differences in bases and amino acids of Cytb gene between different families of Common Coots. In our experiment, the Gytb gene of different families has four mutations: site120,801and1116are transitions and site665is transversion. The one transversion leads to the change of an amino acid from proline (Pro) to histidine (His).4. Egg membranes can be used as the biological sample to achieve DNA by non-destructive method, and the DNA contained is enough for our experiment test.5. No parasitic eggs were found in our samples after experimental analysis based on Cytb gene of Common Coot.The study results preliminary indicated that the detecting method based on Cytb gene can be used to identify CBP of Common Coot. The advantages of this method are non-destructive and can be used under the condition of lacking parental samples. Being confined to the amount of our samples, its reliability needs to be confirmed by more experiments.