Abstract

Despite the importance of sex-specific information for sturgeon conservation and management, sex identification has been a major challenge outside of mature adults on spawning grounds. Recent work identified a sex-specific locus (AllWSex2) that appears to be broadly conserved across many Acipenserids, but the assay was not validated for all species within the family. We tested the AllWSex2 marker in three sturgeon taxa (shortnose sturgeon Acipenser brevirostrum, Gulf sturgeon A. oxyrhinchus desotoi, and Atlantic sturgeon A. oxyrhinchus oxyrhinchus) from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Coasts of North America to validate its use for sex identification. Our results indicate AllWSex2 is conserved in all three taxa, presenting a new opportunity to derive sex-specific information from tissue samples, which are routinely collected from these taxa. We found high concordance (range: 97–100%) between genotypic and phenotypic/histological methods, suggesting the assay is broadly effective. However, the small amount of discordance between the methods (< 3%) suggests further refinement may be possible.

中文翻译：

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北美东部三只鲟鱼分子性别标记的验证

摘要

尽管性别特定信息对于鲟鱼的保护和管理很重要，但性别鉴定一直是产卵场成熟成年鲟鱼之外的主要挑战。最近的工作确定了一个性别特异性基因座（AllWSex2），该基因座似乎在许多鲟鱼科动物中广泛保守，但该测定并未针对该科内的所有物种进行验证。我们在来自北美大西洋和墨西哥湾沿岸的三个鲟鱼类群（短鼻鲟Acipenser brevirostrum、海湾鲟A. oxyrhinchus desotoi和大西洋鲟A. oxyrhinchus oxyrhinchus ）中测试了AllWSex2标记，以验证其在性别鉴定中的用途。我们的结果表明AllWSex2在所有三个类群中都是保守的，这提供了从组织样本中获取性别特异性信息的新机会，这些组织样本是从这些类群中常规收集的。我们发现基因型和表型/组织学方法之间具有高度一致性（范围：97-100%），表明该检测方法广泛有效。然而，这些方法之间的少量不一致 (< 3%) 表明进一步的细化是可能的。