Phylogeny, Pedigree, and Population Structure Studies

The aim of this book is to assess molecular polymorphisms of different types and their optimal use in different situations. Two widely separated taxa were used for testing the green monkey Chlorocebus sabaeus, and the sibling dipteran flies Bactrocera tryoni and B. neohumeralis, known collectively as the Queensland fruit fly. A number of types of molecular polymorphisms can be used for studying genetic relationship and evolutionary history. Microsatellites are hypervariable and can be very useful tools to determine population structure, distinguish sibling species, as well as verifying parental relationships and pedigrees. However, while microsatellite polymorphisms are useful for solving relationships between populations within a species, relations among species or genera will probably be obscured due to a high degree of homoplasy identity arising from evolutionary convergence not by descent. For long range evolutionary history, such as phylogeny from old world monkey to human, mtDNA markers may be better candidates. A complete 16,550 bp mtDNA sequence of the green monkey Chlorocebus sabaeus is reported and has been annotated (Chapter 2). Knowledge of the mtDNA genome contributes not only to identification of large scale single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (Chapter 4) or other mtDNA polymorphisms development, but also to primate phylogenetic and evolutionary study (Chapter 3). Microsatellites used for the green monkey paternity and pedigree studies were developed by cross-amplification using human primers (Chapter 5). For studies of population structure and species discrimination in Queensland fruit fly (Chapter 7), microsatellites were isolated from a genomic library of Bactrocera tryoni (Chapter 6)