Morphometric analysis and fluorescent microsatellite markers to evaluate the genetic diversity of five populations of Penaeus japonicus in China

To understand the current status of germplasm resources of Penaeus japonicus, in this study, genetic diversity was analyzed based on morphometric analysis and fluorescent microsatellite markers. For morphometric analysis, the cumulative ratios of the PC1 and PC2 (85.90%) were greater than 75%, which can explain the morphological variation among populations. For microsatellite analysis, the allele number in 10 microsatellite loci ranged from 27 to 53, and the effective allele number ranged from 21 to 42. The observed heterozygosity ranged from 0.463 to 0.983, whereas expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.932 to 0.966, and the average polymorphism information content was 0.947, which indicated a high level of genetic diversity. The unbiased genetic distance among populations ranged from 0.230 to 0.431, and the genetic similarity coefficient ranged from 0.654 to 0.782. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) showed that the genetic variation within individuals was the main source of variation, accounting for 88.55%, and only 1.49% of the genetic variation came from among populations.