Unbalanced parental contribution and small effective population size （Ne） are common issues during the artificial breeding of marine bivalves. The impact of hatchery-spawning practices on parental contribution, effe...Unbalanced parental contribution and small effective population size （Ne） are common issues during the artificial breeding of marine bivalves. The impact of hatchery-spawning practices on parental contribution, effective population size, the Ne/Nratio, and genetic diversity are largely unknown. To address this, we conducted a parentage analysis on a complete 3×3 diallel cross of clam Meretrix meretrix using eight microsatellite markers. The genetic diversity of the parents was higher than that of their respective offspring in most crosses （8/9）. Sires or dams from the same family contributed unequally to the pool of offspring from a particular cross, and the same parent clam exhibited large variation in parental contribution among different crosses. The variance in male contribution was higher than that of the female contribution in most crosses, suggesting that male contribution was more skewed than for females. The No/N ratio for nine crosses ranged from 0.58 to 0.86. There was no linear relationship between the sex ratio and the Ne/Nratio （P〉0.05）. Moreover, a sex ratio closer to one-to-one does not necessarily mean a larger effective population size. A solution to small effective population size in commercial breeding programs is increasing broodstoek numbers and attempting to maintain a balanced sex ratio.展开更多
基金Supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China(863 Program)(No.2012AA10A410)the Key Technology R&D Program of Jiangsu Province,China(No.BE2011372)
文摘Unbalanced parental contribution and small effective population size （Ne） are common issues during the artificial breeding of marine bivalves. The impact of hatchery-spawning practices on parental contribution, effective population size, the Ne/Nratio, and genetic diversity are largely unknown. To address this, we conducted a parentage analysis on a complete 3×3 diallel cross of clam Meretrix meretrix using eight microsatellite markers. The genetic diversity of the parents was higher than that of their respective offspring in most crosses （8/9）. Sires or dams from the same family contributed unequally to the pool of offspring from a particular cross, and the same parent clam exhibited large variation in parental contribution among different crosses. The variance in male contribution was higher than that of the female contribution in most crosses, suggesting that male contribution was more skewed than for females. The No/N ratio for nine crosses ranged from 0.58 to 0.86. There was no linear relationship between the sex ratio and the Ne/Nratio （P〉0.05）. Moreover, a sex ratio closer to one-to-one does not necessarily mean a larger effective population size. A solution to small effective population size in commercial breeding programs is increasing broodstoek numbers and attempting to maintain a balanced sex ratio.
