Morphological and Genetic Variability of the Mass Whitefish Forms in Lake Onega

In Lake Onega, the whitefish Coregonus lavaretus has been shown to occur as a variety of forms. Medium- and sparsely-ranked whitefish are most abundant. Analysis of available data indicates that whitefish populations from Karelia’s large lakes display the maximum values of various genetic variability indices. This fact seems to be due to the history of the colonization of the lake by the discrete evolutionary whitefish lineages from various Late Quaternary habitats followed by their hybridization. A great variety of Onega whitefish haplotypes is probably related to the genetic heterogeneity of the whitefish who until recently had occurred as five ecological forms ranking as subspecies. The median network obtained suggests that many of the populations studied have become less abundant. The well-defined “star-like” network structure is characteristic of populations that passed through a narrow “bottleneck” in the near past and then expanded rapidly, as indicated by the abundance of rare haplotype varieties. It seems that the retreat of the Scandinavian glacier was not a momentary event but took a long time during which the populations formed were subjected to demographic transformations.

Revisiting genetic structure of Wild Buffaloes Bubalus arnee Kerr, 1792 (Mammalia: Artiodactyla: Bovidae) in Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, Nepal: an assessment for translocation programs

Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve (KTWR) has the last remaining Nepalese population of the Endangered Asiatic Wild Buffalo (Bubalus arnee Kerr, 1792). Individual animals protected inside KTWR may be of purely wild, domestic or hybrid origin, and the wild population is under potential threat due to habitat loss and genetic introgression from feral backcrosses. Identification of genetically pure wild individuals is important for identifying animals for translocation to other areas within their former range. In this study we have sequenced a highly variable 422bp region of the Cytochrome b gene of 36 animals, and added 61 published sequences of both River and Swamp Buffalo from Italy and some southern Asian countries including India. The haplotype diversities ranged from 0.286-0.589 with slightly higher diversities in domesticated individuals. The AMOVA analysis revealed that 97.217% of the genetic variation was contained within groups and 2.782% occurred among groups. An overall fixation index (FST) was found to be 0.02782 (p>0.05). Phylogenetic relationships derived through a reduced median network and maximum parsimony analyses reconfirmed the ancestral nature of the Wild Water Buffalo. Moreover, this study has reviewed recent achievements of molecular research in wild buffalo, assessed the technical capacities of research institutes in Nepal to conduct molecular research required for identifying pure wild individual in KTWR and more importantly initiated DNA bank and DNA sequence library of buffalos, which will enable an international collaboration for advanced molecular research in the future.

Haplotypes, median networks, and diagnostic characters as tools to elucidate the intraspecific genetic and taxonomic structure of bumblebees, with a description of Bombus cryptarum pallidocinctus new subspecies (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Bombus).

Ein Alignment von 168 Sequenzen mitochondrialer DNA von Bombus cryptarum liefert 29 Haplotypen. Ein Median-Network zeigt fünf klar abgrenzbare Cluster, die Haplogruppen (HG) A-E, die durch diagnostische Positionen definiert werden. Vier dieser HG lassen sich bekannten Taxa zuordnen HG-A = B. cryptarum cryptarum, HG-B = B. cryptarum florilegus, HG-D = B. cryptarum albocinctus, und HG-E = B. cryptarum moderatus. Die Haplogruppe C entspricht einem neuen Taxon B. cryptarum pallidocinctus im Rang einer Unterart. Diese neue Unterart wird beschrieben. Die Verbreitung der Eurasiatischen Taxa wird untersucht und die Folgerungen aus Median-Network und geographischer Verbreitung für die mögliche Phylogenie werden diskutiert.StichwörterHymenoptera, Apidae, Bombus, mitochondrial DNA, new subspecies, geographic distributionNomenklatorische Handlungencryptarum pallidocinctus Bertsch et al., 2014 (Bombus), subspec. n.

Mitochondrial portraits of human populations using median networks.

Analysis of variation in the hypervariable region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has emerged as an important tool for studying human evolution and migration. However, attempts to reconstruct optimal intraspecific mtDNA phylogenies frequently fail because parallel mutation events partly obscure the true evolutionary pathways. This makes it inadvisable to present a single phylogenetic tree at the expense of neglecting equally acceptable ones. As an alternative, we propose a novel network approach for portraying mtDNA relationships. For small sample sizes (< approximately 50), an unmodified median network contains all most parsimonious trees, displays graphically the full information content of the sequence data, and can easily be generated by hand. For larger sample sizes, we reduce the complexity of the network by identifying parallelisms. This reduction procedure is guided by a compatibility argument and an additional source of phylogenetic information: the frequencies of the mitochondrial haplotypes. As a spin-off, our approach can also assist in identifying sequencing errors, which manifest themselves in implausible network substructures. We illustrate the advantages of our approach with several examples from existing data sets.