[Study on genetic diversity of wild quail in China with microsatellite DNA markers]

Genetic diversity of domestic quail and two wild quail species distributed in China, wild Japanese quail and wild common quail,was studied by using microsatellite DNA markers. According to the comparison of corresponding genetic index in the three quail populations, such as polymorphism information content (PIC), mean heterozygosity (H) and fixation index etc, wild common quail possessed rich genetic diversity of 4.67 alleles per locus. Its value of PIC and H were the highest, 0.5732 and 0.6621, respectively. Meanwhile, domestic quail had the lowest value, 0.5467 and 0.5933, respectively. Wild Japanese quail had little difference in genetic diversity with domestic quail. In addition,from analyses of fuzzy cluster based on standard genetic distance,the similarity relation matrix coefficients between wild Japanese quail and domestic quail was 0.937, and that between wild common quail and domestic quail was 0.783. All these results showed that wild Japanese quail was closer to the domestic quail in phylogenetic relationship than wild common quail. These results at the molecular level further proved the thesis that domestic quail is originated from wild Japanese quail.