The Genetic Diversity of Tibetan Red Deer Populations Determined using Mitochondrial and Microsatellite Markers

Abstract

To cite this paper: Hua, L. Y. and Z. Minghai, 2017. The genetic diversity of tibetan red deer populations determined using mitochondrial and microsatellite markers. We performed genetic analysis using mitochondrial and microsatellite markers. The mtDNA CytB genes from 54 individual Tibetan red deer were sequenced and 731 bp fragments were obtained. We defined 14 haplotypes with a haplotype diversity (H) of 0.897. The nucleotide diversity (π) between populations was 2.781. Microsatellite typing analysis showed that the average allele number, mean expected heterozygosity and mean observed heterozygosity were 4.385, 0.721 and 0.641, respectively. Our findings suggest that these Tibetan red deer populations have relatively high genetic diversity. As indicated by Tajima′s D and Fu and Li′s D values, these three populations had not significantly deviated from a neutral evolutionary path (p > 0.1), nor was any evidence found to suggest a strong equilibrium selection. AMOVA revealed that the inter-gene flow of these three populations was greater than 1 (5.14 > Nm > 1.67), suggesting that abundant gene flow exists between them. No obvious genetic differentiation was observed. Thus, we propose to protect and control the Tibetan red deer in these three regions as a single management unit.

Functional connectivity in northern swamp deer (Rucervus duvaucelii duvaucelii) population across a fragmented, human-dominated landscape along Gangetic Plains of north India: Implications for conservation in non-protected areas

“…This is particularly important as significant portion of the northern swamp deer distribution is outside protected area regime, where conventional management/ conservation efforts based on Government regulations are ineffective. In this regard, future efforts should consider using standard genetic (microsatellites as in this study and others- Coulon et al 2006Frantz et al 2006Miotto et al 2011Atterby et al 2015Vergara et al 2015 or genomic (SNPs-Edea et al 2013;Viengkone et al 2016;Brito et al 2017;Hua and Minghai 2017) markers in a mark capture-recapture framework to estimate swamp deer populations in this landscape (Andreotti et al 2016;Kierepka et al 2016;Sethi et al 2016;Viengkone et al 2016;Blåhed et al 2019;Cook et al 2020;Li et al 2020) and assess landscape-scale genetic and demographic parameters, as other standard population estimation approaches such as Camera Trap, Line Transect-(Andriolo et al 2005;Fragoso et al 2016;Meek et al 2019;Paul et al 2019). are not conducive in the human-dominated landscape.…”