Genetic Diversity and Population Differentiation of Pinus koraiensis in China

Abstract

Pinus koraiensis is a well-known precious tree species in East Asia with high economic, ornamental and ecological value. More than fifty percent of the P. koraiensis forests in the world are distributed in northeast China, a region with abundant germplasm resources. However, these natural P. koraiensis sources are in danger of genetic erosion caused by continuous climate changes, natural disturbances such as wildfire and frequent human activity. Little work has been conducted on the population genetic structure and genetic differentiation of P. koraiensis in China because of the lack of genetic information. In this study, 480 P. koraiensis individuals from 16 natural populations were sampled and genotyped. Fifteen polymorphic expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) markers were used to evaluate genetic diversity, population structure and differentiation in P. koraiensis. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) of the EST-SSR marker data showed that 33% of the total genetic variation was among populations and 67% was within populations. A high level of genetic diversity was found across the P. koraiensis populations, and the highest levels of genetic diversity were found in HH, ZH, LS and TL populations. Moreover, pairwise Fst values revealed significant genetic differentiation among populations (mean Fst = 0.177). According to the results of the STRUCTURE and Neighbor-joining (NJ) tree analyses and principal component analysis (PCA), the studied geographical populations cluster into two genetic clusters: cluster 1 from Xiaoxinganling Mountains and cluster 2 from Changbaishan Mountains. These results are consistent with the geographical distributions of the populations. The results provide new genetic information for future genome-wide association studies (GWAS), marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection (GS) in natural P. koraiensis breeding programs and can aid the development of conservation and management strategies for this valuable conifer species.

Local adaptation and demographic history of vulnerable conifer Cephalotaxus oliveri in southern China

“…Our results revealed exceptionally high levels of population divergence across the distribution of C. oliveri, with a mean F ST value of 0.338. This value was higher than the level of genetic differentiation among populations reported for P. chienii (0.253; Liu et al, 2021b) and Pinus koraiensis (0.177; Li et al, 2021a), but similar to the value of C. oliveri assessed by ISSR (Wang et al, 2016a). In particular, F ST > 0.5 were detected between the three populations from Yunnan and other populations, indicating that there was strong genetic differentiation between southwestern and central populations in China.…”

Genetic Diversity of Juglans mandshurica Populations in Northeast China Based on SSR Markers

“…The detection of genetic differentiation is a key to promote the genetic improvement of forests (Li et al, 2021 ). Fst measures the degree of differentiation among populations and is a widely used descriptive statistical indicator in population and evolutionary genetics (Holsinger and Weir, 2009 ).…”

Genetic Structure and Historical Dynamics of Pinus densiflora Siebold & Zucc. Populations

“…rubescens (0.0026) [22] was lower than that of P. densiflora. Similarly, the H E (0.2594) was higher than that of P. sylvestris (0.167) [59] and P. tabulaeformis (0.206) [60] but lower than that of P. koraiensis (0.352) [55]. Therefore, the genetic diversity (θ π = 0.0039) of P. densiflora was relatively high among conifer species.…”

“…Historically, its long-term evolution was affected by both environmental and human factors, and oscillating ecological changes, human activities, and agricultural land-use changes affected the distribution of P. densiflora [25]. As P. densiflora is a wind-pollinated and outcrossing plant, long-distance gene flow via pollen can weaken genetic differentiation among populations, but gene flow may be reduced due to longer distances between populations [55]. Subpopulations CH and JP were composed of single populations and comparatively differed from subpopulations JH and JK, which may be related to their geographical location and population size.…”