0000000000408393
AUTHOR
Lutz Debus
Tracing the first steps of American sturgeon pioneers in Europe
Abstract Background A Baltic population of Atlantic sturgeon was founded ~1,200 years ago by migrants from North America, but after centuries of persistence, the population was extirpated in the 1960s, mainly as a result of over-harvest and habitat alterations. As there are four genetically distinct groups of Atlantic sturgeon inhabiting North American rivers today, we investigated the genetic provenance of the historic Baltic population by ancient DNA analyses using mitochondrial and nuclear markers. Results The phylogeographic signal obtained from multilocus microsatellite DNA genotypes and mitochondrial DNA control region haplotypes, when compared to existing baseline datasets from extan…
Ancient mitochondrial DNA analyses of Iberian sturgeons
Summary Today’s European sturgeons are relics of erstwhile widely distributed populations, diminished mainly by overfishing and habitat changes over the centuries. While extinct European populations in the Baltic and North seas have been identified as Acipenser oxyrhinchus or A. sturio, a clear species determination on the Iberian Peninsula is still lacking. Plans to conserve existing populations and to re-introduce extinct wild populations in European rivers will benefit from information of historic population/genotype composition. In this study, we used techniques involving ancient DNA as well as morphological comparisons based on bony scutes to identify twelve samples from five archaeolo…