Study On The Level Of Evolutionary Differentiation Between Domestic Quails And Wild Japanese Quails

A measure was taken in the domestic quails and wild Japanese quails(Coturnix japonica),randomly captured in the Weishan Lake area, about their body weight and body size .Meanwhile,their appearance and biological habits were also observed.And in addition,genetic structure at molecular biotechnique level using ten microsatellite DNA markers was studied.Together with the data above,some information,for example, the ethological affinity ,mechanical mating obstacles between the two populations,the eggs' fertilized rate and progeny F1 etc., was collected from the crossmating and anti-crossmating experiments in the caged environments.With all the messages taken into account,such conclusions can be drawn as follows:1. Domestic quails differ from the wild Japanese ones ,from which they derived,in the morphological, feather colour and biological characters.But due to the short period of domestication,some behaviours of domestic quails are still somewhat wild.2. Ethological isolation and mechaical mating have been formed to a certain degree between domestic quails and the wild Japanese quails in the crossmating experiment under caged conditions.Comparatively.the isolation level between the wild and the pint-sized domestic quails is less.3. Though there are differentiations between the two quail populations,they can still succeed in crossmating and in producing fertilized eggs and progeny F1,whichindicates the gene flow between them.4. The analysis by using ten microsatellite markers manifests the genetic differentiations between the two populations.but to a small extent , that is to say,they have close phylogenetic relationships.5. In this research,eight primer pairs for chicken(Gallus gallus)microsatellite loci were tested in polymerase chain reaction(PCR) amplification of quail genomic DNA.Specific amplification products were obtained with high hererozygosity. Therefore,the conservations among closely related species can provide a method to develop the quails' microsatellites .