The Lanyu pig is an indigenous miniature pig breed on Lanyu Islet near Taiwan, with a mitochondrial DNA genetic lineage remote from Asian and European pig breeds. The unknown population genetic structure and increased inbreeding among the small population of conserved Lanyu pigs is now of great conservation concern. Additionally, the presence for more than a century of exotic pig breeds in Taiw...

Microsatellite genotyping from samples with varying quality can result in an uneven distribution of errors. Previous studies reporting error rates have focused on estimating the effects of both randomly distributed and locus-specific errors. Sample-specific errors, however, can also significantly affect results in population studies despite a large sample size. From two studies including six mi...

Eleven populations of Lutzomyia longipalpis (Lutz & Neiva), the sand fly vector of Leishmania chagasi, from different areas of Brazil were analyzed for genetic variation at 16 enzyme loci. In this region, the prevalence of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) caused by L. chagasi is spotty and reproductive isolation among populations of Lu. longipalpis has been reported. It is thought that morphological...

We isolated and characterized microsatellite loci for the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis) from a microsatellite-enriched database, which was obtained using high-throughput sequencing technology. We designed primer sets for 445 microsatellite loci and after initial screening, 34 loci were genotyped in 31 red-crowned cranes. The number of observed alleles ranged from 3 to 10. Observed and exp...

The pearl oyster Pinctada fucata is a commercially important marine shellfish. As a result, genetic improvement and selective-breeding program have been conducted for this species. Polymorphic microsatellites are effective molecular markers to investigate molecular marker-assisted selection and genetic variance. In this study, microsatellite DNAs were screened and characterized based on the par...

The tiger shark Galeocerdo cuvier (Carcharhinidae) is a large elasmobranch suspected to have, as other apex predators, a keystone function in marine ecosystems and is currently considered Near Threatened (Red list IUCN). Knowledge on its ecology, which is crucial to design proper conservation and management plans, is very scarce. Here we describe the isolation of eight polymorphic microsatellit...

The study aimed to compare MspI polymorphisms in the 3rd intron of the porcine gene encoding the pituitary-1 transcription factor (Pit-1, renamed as POU1F1) among 5 breeds and to determine the associations between its genotypes and growth performance in a commercial pig population by using the PCR-RFLP technique. Significant differences in genotypic and allelic frequencies were found between th...