• Journal of Life Science
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• v.23 no.9
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• pp.1088-1095
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• 2013

The swimming crab, Portunus trituberculatus, inhabits seafloor habitats containing sand or pebbles and is widely distributed throughout the world. The present study investigated genetic polymorphisms of 10 microsatellites in 281 samples of P. trituberculatus collected from four locations along the coastal water of the Korean side of the Yellow Sea (Yeonggwang, Taean, Sorea, and Yeonpyeong-do Island). The number of alleles per locus ranged from 50 to 129, with a mean of 69.5. The observed and expected hetrozygosity varied from 0.111 to 1.000 and from 0.609 to 0.979, respectively. The inbreeding coefficients (Fis) varied among the loci from -0.0207 to 0.8175. The genetic differentiation (Fst) was less than 0.05 (range 0.0020-0.0124). Therefore, the four groups of P. trituberculatus appeared to exhibit little genetic differentiation. The lack of differentiation was confirmed in a phylogenetic tree constructed by the unweighted pair group method with the arithmetic average (UPGMA). The hypervariation between the populations and the lack of genetic differentiation may reflect active gene flow among the Yellow Sea populations and the absence of geographical boundaries. The highly polymorphic microsatellite loci will be useful for molecular and phylogenetic studies, as well as stock management, of swimming crab, which is an important fishery resource.