Genetic diversity and population structure of the Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis in its native range
By L. Sui, Fumin Zhang, Xiaomei Wang, Peter Bossier, Patrick Sorgeloos, B. Hänfling. 2009
96 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis is an indigenous and economically important species in China, but can also be found as invasive species in Europe and America. Mitten crabs have been exploited extensively as a food resource since the 1990s. Despite its ecological and economic importance, the genetic structure of native mitten crab populations is not well understood. In this paper, we investigated the genetic structure of mitten crab populations in China by screening samples from ten locations covering six river systems at six microsatellite loci. Our results provide further evidence that mitten crabs from the River Nanliujiang in Southern China are a genetically differentiated population within the native range of Eriocheir, and should be recognized as a separate taxonomic unit. In contrast, extremely low levels of genetic differentiation and no significant geographic population structure were found among the samples located north of the River Nanliujiang. Based on the reproductive biology of mitten crabs and the geography of their habitat we argue that both natural and human-mediated gene flow are unlikely to fully account for the similar allele frequency distributions at microsatellite loci. Large population sizes of mitten crabs suggest instead that a virtual absence of genetic drift and significant homoplasy of microsatellite alleles have contributed to the observed pattern. Furthermore, a coalescent-based maximum likelihood method indicated a more than two-fold lower effective population size of the Southern population compared to the Northern Group and low but significant levels of gene flow between both areas.
Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12c5a7ae4c84fd773f9c5ced7a0a33b00b14b69e
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In Genetics
In Molecular Biology
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Invasive alien Crustacea: dispersal, establishment, impact and control (2011, background): “For example, invasive alien populations of E. sinensis show significantly lower levels of variation at microsatellite loci than their native counterparts (Herborg et al. 2007c; Sui et al. 2009).”