African Journal of
Biotechnology

  • Abbreviation: Afr. J. Biotechnol.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1684-5315
  • DOI: 10.5897/AJB
  • Start Year: 2002
  • Published Articles: 12502

Article in Press

Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs) in Indian Cervidae based on mitochondrial loci: A Wildlife Forensic Approach

Kumar Ved

  •  Received: 14 February 2019
  •  Accepted: 14 February 2019
India is the second largest mega biodiversity in the world, it sustains many species of animals and plant, among them, cervidae is the major mammal's group; currently, seven different cervidae are present in the Indian subcontinent. Last two decades, the population of this species declining continuously due to poaching, habitat distraction, and anthropogenic pressure. The wildlife crime is well known and it is the major factor has observable effects with the drastically decline in many species of wildlife. Wildlife DNA forensic emerged field of conservation genetic, implemented for control the poaching and illegal trades. Presently, modernization of criminal activity in wildlife crime society, wildlife forensic community has challenged to modernize their technique to controlling the criminal activity. SNPs based approach is widely used and popular approached, used in wildlife for molecular analysis. The present study is SNPs based approach, we first time sort out the species-specific SNPs in Cyt b and 12S rRNA mitochondrial loci among all seven Indian deer species. We identified 93 and 35 Variable sites, 41 and 27 specific singleton sites respectively. A Cyt b mtDNA locus shows a high number of variability compared with 12S rRNA loci. The average Disparity index in both loci was 0.068 and 0.01 respectively, while the average sequences divergence between and within the genera was 0.11 and 0.02 respectively. The obtained Indian cervidae fixed SNPs of both mitochondrial loci are useful in wildlife forensic and conservation genetic to in future . The study also highlights the need for adequate reference material to aid in the resolution of suspected cases of illegal wildlife harvesting.