A new oligonucleotide probe for the giant panda

Abstract

Quantifying genetic diversity in populations is one of the fundamental measures for species conservation. This is far more important for critically endangered species like giant pandas, where there are few individuals remaining in the population. However, previous multilocus probes could not identify homozygous loci resulting from inbreeding of giant pandas, and produced few polymorphic loci. As a result, we have prepared a new oligonucleotide probe, which had the highest paternity probability and succeeded in identifying the homozygous loci and in discriminating giant panda individuals.