Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Chum Salmon in the North Pacific

摘要

Analysis of population structure and stock identification has been carried out by a number of different methods. In this study, we used SNPs in 730bp long sequences of the mtDNACOIII-ND3-ND4L region in order to examine genetic diversity and population structure of chum salmon in the North Pacific. In a total of 201 individuals analyzed, 48 from Korea, 44 from Japan, 45 from Alaska, 29 from Canada, 20 from Washington (USA) and 15 from east Sakhalin Island (Russia), as many as 55 variable sites comprising 51 different haplotypes were identified. Some of the haplotypes were population-specific so that they can be used for stock identification. Canadian and one of the Korean populations showed relatively high levels of haplotype diversity (h, 0.70±0.11 - 0.92±0.06) while Russian and one of the Korean populations showed low variability (h, 0.37±0.15 - 0.42±0.16). Pairwise FST and AMOVA analyses of the populations revealed that Korean and Japanese chum salmon are genetically indistinguishable and so are Russian, Alaskan, and Canadian salmon (FST < 0.1). Therefore, we suppose that the chum salmon populations in the North Pacific can be grouped, in general, into three genetic population units: a Korea-Japan unit, a Russia (east Sakhalin)-Alaska-Canada unit, and a Washington (USA) unit.