Journal Club: Population differentiation in Asian Elephants
Madhusudan Katti
Monday, 21 July 2008 16:51 UTC
New group member Mandar Nanajkar has suggested the following paper for discussion in the group’s journal club:
Vidya TNC, P Fernando, DJ Melnick and R Sukumar (2005) Population differentiation within and among Asian elephant (Elephas maximus_) populations in southern India. Heredity 94, 71–80.
Abstract "_PDF":http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v94/n1/pdf/6800568a.pdf
Has anyone else read it? I’ve only managed to skim it and don’t have anything significant to contribute here yet. I hope Mandar can get a discussion rolling with questions or thoughts he has.
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Replies
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What I find interesting in this article is the geographic barrier acting in a direction towards population isolation…at least partially in the case of Elepants. This Palaghat pass (Hope everyone knows about the palaghat pass…anyone who knows something interesting about such habitats may please elaborate)has made a difference to such a macromammal….how much differnce it would have made to others such as insects, molluscs and many sluggish movers. How many such recently created barriers exist in India? And how is it going to affect these fragmented ecosystems?
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Not being very literate in the field of genetics, I have actually a very illiterate question to ask. How is genetic variation, as applied in the last sentence of the abstract of the paper, defined?
Does it have an extrapolative value-in other words, when there is a difference between two populations in the diversity of microsatellite sequence or mitochondrial DNA, is it correct to say that differences in the expression or regulation of other genes, developmental, metabolic or regulatory, prevail between the two populations?
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