Identification of mammalian species using the short and highly variable regions of mitochondrial DNA.
The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) typing is useful for the species determination of degraded samples and the nucleotide diversity of target fragments across species is crucial for the discrimination. In this study, the short and highly polymorphic regions flanked by two conserved termini were sought by the sequence alignment of mtDNA across species and two target regions located at 12S rRNA gene were characterized. Two universal primer sets were developed that appear to be effective for a wide variety of mammalian species, even for domestic birds. The two target regions could be efficiently amplified using their universal primer sets on degraded samples and provide sufficient information for species determination. Therefore, the two short and highly variable target regions might provide a high discriminative capacity and should be suitable for the species determination of degraded samples.
Department of Forensic Medicine, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University , Shanghai , China.
Jianhui
J
Xie
Wei
W
Zhu
Yueqin
Y
Zhou
Zhiping
Z
Liu
Yang
Y
Chen
Ziqin
Z
Zhao
D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000235:genetics; D002965:Classification / Q000379:methods; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000737:chemistry*; D008322:Mammals / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013045:Species Specificity
D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial
12S rRNA; Degraded DNA; mitochondrial DNA; species identification