Analysis of Genetic Diversity in Wild and Domesticated Stocks of the Tropical Abalone Haliotis asinina by Microsatellite Polymorphism

Abstract

The basic information on genetic diversity of wild and hatchery-propagated stocks of tropical abalone, Haliotis asinina is important for the construction of a breeding scheme leading to the sustainable culturing activity of this species. In this study, 2,876 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were in silico analyzed and 178 EST sequences contained microsatellite motifs. Four loci (DW455, DW503, PHe177, and PT102) of type I and two loci (Haμ9 and Haμ10) of type II microsatellites were applied for genetic diversity studies. The mean number of alleles per locus and observed heterogeneity in wild populations were 4.167 and 0.483, and 4.833 and 0.528 for CAME (east coast) and TRGW (west coast) while those of hatchery-propagated samples were 3.000 and 0.708, 4.500 and 0.479, 5.167 and 0.524, and 6.333 and 0.527 for PHIH (2nd generation, G2; Philippines), SAMH (G1), SMaRT-TRGH (G8) and SMaRT-SICH (G8), respectively. The numbers of alleles, observed heterozygosity and effective population sizes suggested no severe reduction of genetic diversity in our breeding program of H. asinina. However, reduced Ne was observed in the cultured stocks from the Philippines (PHIH). FST-statistics and the exact test between pairs of samples revealed significant genetic differences between all pairwise comparisons of samples in this study.