TDK conference 2008

The Ablepharus kitaibelii fitzingeri Mertens, 1952 is strictly protected in Hungary. There is lot of information about the morphology and distribution, but there is not any about the genetic pool. For the conservation biology it is essential to know the similarities and the differences between the populations.

In this study, we collected tail samples from the lizards. We had 70 samples all together of which 49 derive from the Carpathian Basin.

The aim of the study was to find a suitable method to analyse the genetic pool of the Snake-eyed skink. We tested two methods in our study: the first was the comparison of the mitochondrial marker, cytochrome b gene sequences. The differences in the sequences were used to infer the genetic relationships between the populations of the snake-eyed skink in the Carpathian Basin. The second was the microsatellite-directed DNA fingerprinting by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of the interrepeat region (ISSR-PCR).

The sequencing was not usable for us, because we could not amplify any products in PCR in spite of the application of suitable quality and amount of template DNA. A possible explanation for the failure of the PCR was that the primers could not anneal to the target DNA.

However, using ISSR-PCR we got characteristic patterns of the PCR products. We selected 3 lizard populations to demonstrate the genetic analysis. Using the gel-patterns we prepared a presence-absence matrix, and from the matrix we prepared a fenogram, to illustrate the genetic differences between the populations.

We found that ISSR-PCR is a suitable method for investigating the phylogenetic lineages of snake-eyed skink. We also demonstrated that river Danube is an isolating factor between the populations.