Genetic analysis of farmed and wild stocks of large yellow croaker Larimichthys crocea by using microsatellite markers

The large yellow croaker (Pseudosciaena crocea) is one of the most economically important mariculture fish species in China. In this study, the genetic diversity and relationship among a wild stock, four farmed stocks and a selectively bred strain of large yellow croaker were assessed by 14 microsatellite markers. A total of 108 different alleles were detected over all loci. The average number of allele per locus ranged from 5.57 to 7.93, with an average of 6.75; the observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.572 to 0.665 and from 0.649 to 0.751, with an average of 0.621 and 0.694, respectively; the Shannon’s diversity index ranged from 1.34 to 1.64, with an average of 1.48. The selectively bred strain had the lowest genetic diversity; all farmed stocks showed a slight reduction of genetic variability contrasted with wild stock. All stocks suffered severe bottleneck. The pair-wise FST, the phylogenetic tree, the factor correspondence analysis and the model based clustering analysis revealed that, the Ningbo stock, which was from Zhejiang province, was different from the remaining stocks from Fujian province. This study suggested that (1) the farmed stocks were at relatively low level of genetic diversity compared with the wild stock; (2) samples from Ningbo investigated in this study have a distinct divergence with those from Fujian province; (3) there had emerged significant differentiation among farmed stocks.Key words: Pseudosciaena crocea, large yellow croaker, genetic structure, microsatellite markers