Isolation And Characterization Of Microsatellite DNA Markers From Forest Musk Deer (Moschus Berezovskii) And Polymorphism Study

Forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii), one of five musk deer species in theworld, distributes in southwest part of China and the adjacent areas. In China, overhalf of the forest musk deer are distributed throughout Sichuan Province. Due tohabitat destruction and over-exploitation of the musk pod, wild musk deerpopulations have sharply decreased from more than 1,000,000 in the 1960s to lessthan 200,000 in the 1990s. As a result, all musk deer species have been listed in theAppendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of WildFauna and Flora (CITES) since 1979. In 2002, they were cited in the first class of"key" species of wildlife as protected by Chinese legislation. In china, many farmswere built up for keeping forest musk deer. However, previous researches aboutmusk deer focused mostly on the morphology, physiology, and taxonomy and less ongenetics.Microsatellites are called as simple sequence repeats (SSRs) with tandem repeatmotifs of 1-6 bases and are extensively distributed in both coding and non-codingregions of eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes. Microsatellites are generallyconsidered to be the most powerful Mendelian markers currently available forpopulation genetic studies because they are highly variable, more likely to be neutral as compared with other genetic makers, and results are reproducible. The informationprovided by these markers can address many biological questions, such as thedetermination of individual identity and relatedness, population genetic structure, andevolutionary relationships.However only a few microsatellite loci have been isolated from the forest muskdeer so far. The number of those loci is limited for the polymorphic study aboutforest musk deer. In this study, we obtained 13 microsatellites using PCRoptimization and from Cross-species' microsatellite loci. Among them fivemicrosatellite loci showed high polymorphism and were used to analyze twopopulations of Jinfeng breeding and Maerkang breeding populations of Sichuanprovince.The number of alleles per locus ranged from 4 to 13, with anaverage of 8.8 inJinfeng breeding population and 6.8 in Maerkang breeding population. The numbersof effective alleles of each locus were between 2.341 to 8.605 in Jinfeng breedingpopulation and 3.328 to 9.020 in Maerkang breeding poplation. The average numbersof effect alleles per locus were 4.979 and 4.830. The observed and expectedheterozygosities ranged from 0.429 to 0.957 and 0.587 to 0.902 in Jinfeng population,from 0.391 to 0.913and 0.716 to 0.920 in Maerkang, repectively. The polymorphicinformation content (PIC) values for these loci were from 0.519 to 0.891. Theseresults suggest that the forest musk deers in Jinfeng breeding population and inMaerkang breeding population have high polymorphisms.