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Patterns of genetic variation within a captive population of Amur tigerPanthera tigris altaica

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Abstract

Eight founders and thirty-one descendants were sampled as the Founder group and the Offspring group respectively from a captive population of Amur tigerPanthera tigris altaica Temminck, 1844 for population genetic analysis with RAPD and ISSR markers. Integrated with demographic data during the initial recovery stage, results showed: (1) increasing the population size (N) and the effective population size (N e) greatly retard lose of genetic variation induced mainly by genetic drift and selection; (2) recombination and admixture could cause the Offspring group (5.711%) and the Founder group (10.383%) to hold different linkage disequilibrium (LD); (3) further Ohta’s variance analysis indicated genetic drift (87.3%) and epistatic selection (12.7%) maintained LD in population, whereas GENEDROP analysis supported epistatic selection largely derived from artificial selection of managers; (4) both Tajima’s test and Fu’s test confirmed the statistic neutrality of genetic markers used, moreover the positive value of Tajima’sD (0.090) together with the result that π (25.286) was bigger than ϑ (24.898) revealed the Founder group was admixture population, while the negative Tajima’sD value (−0.053) together with the result that π (23.679) was less than ϑ (23.912) disclosed the Offspring group experienced selective sweep.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Wildlife Resources, Northeast Forestry University, 26 Hexing Road, 150040, Harbin, China

    Dong Zheng, Xuedong Liu & Jianzhang Ma

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  1. Dong Zheng
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  2. Xuedong Liu
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  3. Jianzhang Ma
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Associate Editor was Joseph F. Merritt.

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Zheng, D., Liu, X. & Ma, J. Patterns of genetic variation within a captive population of Amur tigerPanthera tigris altaica . Acta Theriol 50, 23–30 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192615

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192615

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