The availability of a rapid and accurate method for the diagnosis of Photobacterium damselae subsp. piscicida ( Phdp ), able to discriminate its strictly correlated subsp. damselae ( Phdd ), formally known as Vibrio damsela , is essential for managing fish pasteurellosis outbreaks in farmed fish. A single‐step, high‐sensitivity real‐time PCR assay for simultaneous detection and quantification of P. damselae was designed target...

Determining the timing, extent and underlying causes of interspecific gene exchange during or following speciation is central to understanding species' evolution. Antarctic notothenioid fish, thanks to the acquisition of antifreeze glycoproteins during Oligocene transition to polar conditions, experienced a spectacular radiation to >100 species during Late Miocene cooling events. The impact of recent glacial cycles on this gro...

Aphanius fasciatus is a cyprinodont distributed in the salty coastal water of the central and eastern Mediterranean Sea and occasionally in internal fresh water. In this work, the authors have investigated the genetic structure of eight populations of the killifish A. fasciatus from Sardinia and Sicily. The comparison of the mtDNA control region of 237 individuals revealed a total of 49 haplotypes. Several unique haplotypes we...

The Antarctic silverfish Pleuragramma antarcticum (Nototheniidae) is the most abundant pelagic fish inhabiting Antarctic waters. In this study we investigated, through partial sequencing of the D‐loop mitochondrial region, samples collected at four different locations in the Southern Ocean, three in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific sector. Sampling was replicated in two different years at two locations. Sequence analysis sh...

Population genetic structures of the mackerel (Scomber scombrus ) and chub mackerel ( Scomber japonicus ) were studied in the Mediterranean Sea. Fragments of 272 bp ( S. scomber ) and 387 bp ( S. japonicus ) of the 5′‐end of the mitochondrial control region were sequenced from spawning individuals collected off the coasts of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. High levels of mitochondrial control region haplotypic diversity (>...

Although analyses of intraspecific variability are an important prerequisite for species identification assays, only a few studies have focused on population genetics and historical biogeography of sturgeon species. Here we present the first study on genetic variability of the last remaining Adriatic sturgeon, Acipenser naccarii , derived from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. Our mitochondrial DNA analyses arranged individuals i...

In the last few years microsatellites have become one of the most popular molecular markers used with applications in many different fields. High polymorphism and the relative ease of scoring represent the two major features that make microsatellites of large interest for many genetic studies. The major drawback of microsatellites is that they need to be isolated de novo from species that are being examined for the first time....

The identification of interspecific hybrids represents an important issue for conservation biology and trade controls. In Italy, the commercial demand for sturgeon is rapidly increasing and interspecific hybrids represent a relevant part of aquacultural production. In this study we tested the suitability of the amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) technique for sturgeon hybrid detection. Multilocus AFLP profiles were...