The Screening Of Microsatellite DNA Loci For The Identification Of Individual Tibetan Foxes, Using Copro-DNA Samples

The Tibetan fox (Vulpesferrilata) has been identified as the main wildlife host ofhinococcusmmulilocularisand Echinococcusshiquicusin the eastern Tibetan plateau in China. Thus, Echinococcusprevalence in Tibetan fox populations is of interest for studies into this disease. Consequently, it has a practical significance to evaluate the population size of Tibetan foxes. It’s feasibility to conduct the research on the population size of Tibetan fox with the help of molecular biology technique, which breaks the limitation of macroecologyapplication.Microsatellite technique will have a more comprehensive application prospect with the advantages of widely spreading in eucaryon, rich contents about polymorphism information, be in common use between allied species and low loss of DNA samples.Therefore we developed noninvasive microsatellite DNA identity analysis techniques using Tibetan fox feces. Eleven microsatellite loci from published literature were tested for effectiveness and selected to analyze identities of128qualified Tibetan fox fecal samples (i.e.,68in2011, and60in2012) collected in field during July-august,2011and2012. Number of genotypes (N), expected heterozygosity (He), observed heterozygosity (Ho), polymorphism information content (PIC) and probability of identity (PI) were calculated by allelic frequency. N ranged from4to7, He was0.66-0.80, Ho was0.17～0.68, and PIC was0.7623～0.5496,. PI based on the six loci (i.e., P03, CXX172, CPH6, CPH8, POli, P08) with the highest PCR amplification success rates were less than0.004(i.e., PIbiased=2.775×10-7; PIsibs=3.606×10-3) which showed that the six loci should be a powerful tool for individual identification analysis in Tibetan foxes. We then identified30fox individuals from fecal samples in2011, and21individuals from fecal samples in2012.