Parentage determination in the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii De Man, 1879 using microsatellite markers

Abstract

Macrobrachium rosenbergii is an important cultured species in India and other tropical and sub-tropical countries. Selective breeding and genetic improvement of this species poses a big challenge, due to the problems associated in the identification of the pedigree. Physical tagging of the progeny for pedigree identification is costly, and it takes long time and induces bias in the estimation of genetic parameters. Microsatellites are commonly used to detect parents and their offsprings in wild and captive populations, to assign parentage. In the present study. a total of 1788 specimens comprising 160 offsprings and 18 female parents were used for pedigree assigning. Four M. rosenbergii microsatelIites were selected for parentage assignment and CERVUS-3.0 software was used to determine the parentage. The average number of alleles per microsatellite marker was 3, with the allele size ranging from 184 to 246 bp, the polymorphic information content (PIC) was 0.412 and the observed average heterozygosity was 0.548. The combined exclusion probabilities for the first and second parent were 0.422 and 0.640, respectively. The success of assigning the offsprings to one parent was 69.23%. Results of the present study indicates that microsatellites can be employed to identify the parentage in M. rosenbergii. However, the number of loci needed and the type of microsatellites, needs to be standardised further for enhancing the rate of success.