For responsible fisheries management of threatened species, it is essential to know the composition of catches and the extent to which fisheries exploit weak wild populations. The threatened Estonian, Finnish and Russian sea trout populations in the Gulf of Finland are targets of mixed-stock fisheries. The fish may originate from rivers with varying production capacities, from different countries, and they may also have either a wild or hatchery origin. In order to resolve the composition of Finnish coastal sea trout catches, we created a standardized baseline dataset of 15 DNA microsatellite loci for 59 sea trout populations around the Gulf of Finland and tested its resolution for mixed-stock analysis of 1372 captured fish. The baseline dataset provided sufficient resolution for reliable mixture analysis at regional group level, and also for most of the individual rivers stocks. The majority (76–80%) of the total catch originated from Finnish sea trout populations, 6–9% came from Russian and 12–15% from Estonian populations. Nearly all Finnish trout in the catch were of hatchery origin, while the Russian and Estonian trout were mostly of wild origin. The proportion of fish in the Finnish catches that originated from rivers with natural production was at least one fifth (22%, 19–23%). Two different spotting patterns were observed among the captured trout, with a small and sparsely spotted form being markedly more common among individuals of Russian (28%) and Estonian origin (22%) than among fish assigned to a Finnish origin (0.7%).
Wheat bread-making quality is mainly determined by glutenin proteins in the grain, which exist in a wide range of variable alleles with differential influence on processing attributes. A recently identified allele, Bx7 over-expression (Bx7oe), has been showing highly significant positive effects on wheat dough strength over the normally expressed Bx7 allele. SDS-PAGE and normal RP-HPLC procedures failed to separate the two alleles. In the current study, an extensively optimised MALDI-TOF based procedure and a refined DNA based marker for efficiently differentiating Bx7oe from normal Bx7 allele were established. Results indicated that the MALDI-TOF procedure is cost effective, high throughput, and proven reliable, while the refined PCR marker only amplifies Bx7oe allele, a clear advantage over the previously developed codominant marker.
We studied and established a DNA database of 15 Y-STRs (DYS438, DYS446, DYS391, DYS390, DYS458, DYS534, DYS426, DYS626, DYS504, DYS505, DYS576, DYS532, DYS594, DYS522, DYS540) in a population sample of 102 unrelated, healthy, male individuals of Henan Han population. Allelic frequencies and statistical parameters of Han population were calculated. Totally 90 alleles were observed, with the corresponding allelic frequencies ranging from 0.0098 to 0.9020. 102 haplotypes were found in the studied group, the haplotype diversity for 15 Y-STR loci was 1. The results of present study were valuable for human identification and paternity tests routine forensic applications in the region.