GENETIC DIVERSITY AMONG CHINESE SIKA DEER (CERVUS NIPPON) POPULATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CHINESE AND JAPANESE SIKA DEER

SIKA DEER,CERVUS NIPPON,WAS HISTORICALLY WIDE-SPREAD THROUGHOUT NORTHEASTERN ASIA,FROM THE USSURI REGION TO VIETNAM,INCLUDING THE KOREAN PENINSULA,MAINLAND CHINA AND TAIWAN,AND THE JAPANESE ARCHI-PELAGO,AND UP TO13SUBSPECIES HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED1].THE FOS…

Genetic diversity among Chinese sika deer (Cervus nippon) populations and relationships between Chinese and Japanese sika deer

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) is a cervid endemic to mainland and insular Asia and endan-gered. We analyzed variation in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region for four subspecies to understand the genetic diversity, population structure and evolutionary history in China. 335 bp were se-quenced and eight haplotypes were identified based on 25 variable sites among the populations. Sika deer in China showed lower genetic diversity, sug-gesting a small effective population size due to habi-tat fragmentation, a low number of founder individu-als, or the narrow breeding program. AMOVA analy-sis indicated that there was significant genetic subdi-vision among the four populations, but no correlation between the genetic and geographic distance. Phy-logenetic analyses also revealed that Chinese sika deer may be divided into three genetic clades, but the genetic structure among Chinese populations was inconsistent with subspecies designations and pre-sent geographic distribution. Including the sequence data of Japanese sika deer, the results indicated that Chinese populations were more closely related to Southern Japanese populations than to the Northern Japanese one, and the Taiwan population was closer to populations of Northeastern China and Sichuan than to those of Southern China.