Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Journal Open Access

Molecular population genetics of Nasonia (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea)

EuroScicon Joint event on Genetics, Cell and Gene Therapy

August 20-21, 2018 Amsterdam,Netherlands

Garima Prazapati and Raychoudhury R

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, India

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Biochem Mol biol

Abstract:

Nasonia is a genus of parasitoid wasp of inter-fertile species that habitually inbreed. Due to the patchy distribution of its host, populations of Nasonia are thought to be extremely sub-structured. Out of the four known species, N. vitripennis is cosmopolitan, N. giraulti and N. longicornis are found in the North-eastern and North-western part of North America, respectively whereas N. oneida is sympatric with N. giraulti. We employed bioinformatics and molecular population genetics tools and software to study the population genetics parameters. Sequence information was obtained from 65 strains gathered from North America, Europe and India from 36 nuclear and mitochondrial markers spread across the genome, totalling 25.855 Kb. We identified Nasonia vitripennis in India and found that Indian strains cluster separately from the American and European ones indicating the presence of strong population sub-structure. Population sub-structure is indicative of incipient speciation. The measures of genetic variation in comparison with Drosophila melanogaster show that Nasonia vitripennis nucleotide diversity is lower. Population differentiation due to genetic structure (Fst value) is higher between Europe-India and India-North America, which is an indication of low migration rates. We further studied the divergence time between the four species, the origin and the direction of spread of vitripennis.

Biography :

Garima Prazapati has completed her Masters’ in Genomics from Punjab University, India. She was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship and Lectureship (LS) award by CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), one of the largest R&D organizations of Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), Government of India, to pursue research in Life Sciences in any research institution in India. In 2015, she joined PhD at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, a premier research institution in India. Her research area is Behavioural and Population Genetics, in the field of entomology.

E-mail: garimaprazapati@gmail.com