Identification of mammalian species using the short and highly variable regions of mitochondrial DNA

Abstract

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) typing is useful for the species determination of degraded samples and the nucleotide diversity of target fragments across species is crucial for the discrimination. In this study, the short and highly polymorphic regions flanked by two conserved termini were sought by the sequence alignment of mtDNA across species and two target regions located at 12S rRNA gene were characterized. Two universal primer sets were developed that appear to be effective for a wide variety of mammalian species, even for domestic birds. The two target regions could be efficiently amplified using their universal primer sets on degraded samples and provide sufficient information for species determination. Therefore, the two short and highly variable target regions might provide a high discriminative capacity and should be suitable for the species determination of degraded samples.

• Degraded DNA
• mitochondrial DNA
• species identification
• 12S rRNA

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Hong-Xiang Zheng (Fudan University) for assistance in phylogenetic analysis. This work was supported by National Science Foundation for Fostering Talents in Basic Research of China (J1210041) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31270862).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.