Molecular Sexing Cranes And Ciconias Based On CHD-W Gene

Cranes and Ciconias are monomorphic birds, so it is difficult to determine their sexes. PCR was conducted with specially designed primers to amplify the 180bp female-specific segments on CHD gene. The products were cloned into vector pMD-18T and transformed into E.coli DH-5α. Positive clones were selected for sequencing. The sequences were submitted to GenBank (Accession Number: AY366489, AY366703, AY367004, AY367005, AY377921). The highly conserved regions in cranes were 176 bp, consisted of 87 bp intron b and 89 bp exon. This section was female-specific. The sequences were aligned by Clustal W using DNAstar 2.0 Megalign to study its origination as well as its evolution. Most of the artificially paired cranes and Ciconia can propagate normally, which further confirmed that the sex determination during the early stage was successful. Compared with former identification methods, the identification range of our method is larger and with more application potential. The former sexing determination ways are only limited to one kind of birds, while the pair of primers designed in our experiment has been proved to be very useful to determine the sexes of both cranes and Ciconias. Whether this method could be applied to other animals sex determination still needs to be expanded its testing scope. It can be applied and disseminated in zoos, as well as wild animal protection and salvation departments.