Abstract
The European badger (Meles meles) breeds plurally in lowland England and is important economically due to its link with bovine tuberculosis (Mycobacterium bovis) transmission. To understand disease transmission and facilitate effective management, it is vital to elucidate the social structure of badger groups. To improve parentage assignment and the discrimination of relatives, we isolated and characterised 21 polymorphic microsatellite loci in 24 individuals from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, UK. These 21 loci increased the discrimination power between full-siblings and half-siblings from 71 to 88%, when added to the existing 31 loci. Similarly, the combined non-exclusion probability increased from 3.0 × 10−8 to 5.8 × 10−13. Newly isolated Mel-592 (FR745854) was X-linked, based on the genotypes of 48 known-sex individuals and will enhance the genetic sex-ty** of badgers.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Wytham Woods badger team, Andy Krupa, Alain Frantz and Yung Wa Sin for assistance. This research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council Biomolecular Analysis Facility-Sheffield, The Peoples Trust for Endangered Species (DWM), The Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia (GA), and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Rubicon fellowship; HLD). Animal handling licences were: Natural England 20001537 and Home Office PPL30/1216.
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Annavi, G., Dawson, D.A., Horsburgh, G.J. et al. Characterisation of twenty-one European badger (Meles meles) microsatellite loci facilitates the discrimination of second-order relatives. Conservation Genet Resour 3, 515–518 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12686-011-9392-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12686-011-9392-9