Study of population genetic polymorphism and gene flow rate in Indian snow trout, Schizothorax richardsonii fish of Himalaya, India.

Abstract

The genetic polymorphism and gene flow rate among the Indian snow trout fish population S. richadsonii from three different locations viz., Chirapani stream of Champawat district, Kosi and Gola river of Nainital district, Uttarakhand State, India were assessed by employing twenty numbers of Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers. The overall percent polymorphisms among these three populations were 14.76 with 6.56, 4.92 and 3.28 in Chirapani, Kosi and Gola river population, respectively. Chirapani population had higher proportion of polymorphic loci as compared to the Kosi and Gola. The higher value of genetic distance (0.1565) was obtained between Chirapani and Gola population and the lower value of genetic distance was observed between Chirapani and Kosi (0.1058) river population. The cluster analysis revealed that in the formation of two clusters, one consisted of Chirapani and Kosi and the other was Gola fish population. Gst estimates among these populations showed some extent of homogeneity with lower genetic differentiation rate between populations and further suggested that higher tolerance to mutation, as expected that RAPD bands, arose from both coding and non-coding DNA regions. The findings revealed that the rate of gene flow in three populations seemed very low i.e. highly conserved its genetic diversity in their natural water bodies and indicative of little migration among populations (geographically isolated and not the possibilities man made interventions/introduction of similar kind of fish species). It is further concluded that the Chirapani, Kosi and Gola river populations of S. richardsonii were being conserved naturally in their habitat and the species actual genetic potential were being maintained (adaptation to local climatic conditions, reproduction, production traits and disease resistance trait etc) in their natural habitat.