Department of Biology, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Heredity (Edinb). 2012 Nov;109(5):299-305. doi: 10.1038/hdy.2012.42. Epub 2012 Aug 1.
In species with large geographic ranges, genetic diversity of different populations may be well studied, but differences in loci and sample sizes can make the results of different studies difficult to compare. Yet, such comparisons are important for assessing the status of populations of conservation concern. We propose a simple approach of using a single well-studied reference population as a 'yardstick' to calibrate results of different studies to the same scale, enabling comparisons. We use a well-studied large carnivore, the brown bear (Ursus arctos), as a case study to demonstrate the approach. As a reference population, we genotyped 513 brown bears from Slovenia using 20 polymorphic microsatellite loci. We used this data set to calibrate and compare heterozygosity and allelic richness for 30 brown bear populations from 10 different studies across the global distribution of the species. The simplicity of the reference population approach makes it useful for other species, enabling comparisons of genetic diversity estimates between previously incompatible studies and improving our understanding of how genetic diversity is distributed throughout a species range.
在地理分布范围广泛的物种中，不同种群的遗传多样性可能已经得到了很好的研究，但由于基因座和样本大小的差异，使得不同研究的结果难以进行比较。然而，这种比较对于评估受到保护关注的种群的状况非常重要。我们提出了一种简单的方法，即使用一个研究充分的参考种群作为“标准”，将不同研究的结果校准到同一尺度，从而实现比较。我们以一种研究充分的大型食肉动物——棕熊（Ursus arctos）为例，来演示这种方法。我们使用 20 个多态性微卫星基因座对来自斯洛文尼亚的 513 头棕熊进行了基因分型，作为参考种群。我们利用这个数据集来校准和比较 10 个不同研究中来自全球棕熊分布范围内的 30 个种群的杂合度和等位基因丰富度。参考种群方法的简单性使其适用于其他物种，能够比较以前不兼容的研究中的遗传多样性估计值，并提高我们对遗传多样性在物种分布范围内是如何分布的理解。
