Search

In the last few decades, populations of wild boars have been spreading throughout Europe. This expansion is problematic because of conflicts with human activities and/or sanitary reasons. Thus, the need to develop tools to understand wild boar populations’ increase as well as to manage efficiently their populations appears crucial but challenging. As ancestor of the domestic pig, one of the main issues associated with this population spread is the possible hybridization between the two subspecies which complicates the identification of pure individuals. In this study, we propose a set of 20 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers, allocated in two 10-plexes, selected in order to identify the two subspecies. The multiplexes were validated on reference populations of wild boars and domestic pigs in order to assess their polymorphism and their discriminative power. The selected markers allowed for an exacerbated differentiation between the wild boars and the domestic pigs compared to other studies and thus allows for an efficient identification of species. The low size of this panel of 20 SNP markers makes it a tool compatible with economic constraints associated with wildlife management compared to tools based on chips.

Background The distinction between lineages of neotropical bats from the Pteronotus parnellii species complex has been previously made according to mitochondrial DNA, and especially morphology and acoustics, in order to separate them into two species. In these studies, either sample sizes were too low when genetic and acoustic or morphological data were gathered on the same individuals, or genetic and other data were collected on different individuals. In this study, we intensively sampled bats in 4 caves and combined all approaches in order to analyse genetic, morphologic, and acoustic divergence between these lineages that live in the same caves in French Guiana. Results A multiplex of 20 polymorphic microsatellite markers was developed using the 454-pyrosequencing technique to investigate for the first time the extent of reproductive isolation between the two lineages and the population genetic structure within lineages. We genotyped 748 individuals sampled between 2010 and 2015 at the 20 nuclear microsatellite loci and sequenced a portion of the cytochrome c oxydase I gene in a subset of these. Two distinct, non-overlapping haplogroups corresponding to cryptic species P. alitonus and P. rubiginosus were revealed, in accordance with previous findings. No spatial genetic structure between caves was detected for both species. Hybridization appeared to be quite limited (0.1–4%) using microsatellite markers whereas introgression was more common (7.5%) and asymmetric for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Conclusions The extremely low rate of hybridization could be explained by differences in life cycle phenology between species as well as morphological and acoustical distinction between sexes in one or the other species. Taken together, these results add to our growing understanding of the nature of species boundaries in Pteronotus parnelli, but deserve more in-depth studies to understand the evolutionary processes underlying asymmetric mtDNA introgression in this group of cryptic species. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12862-018-1289-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.