Abstract

Common carp (Cyprinus carpio) has an outstanding economic importance in freshwater aquaculture due to its high adaptive capacity to both food and environment. In fact, it is the third most farmed fish species worldwide according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. More than four million tons of common carp are produced annually in aquaculture, and more than a hundred thousand tons are caught from the wild. Historically, the common carp was also the first fish species to be domesticated in ancient China, and now, there is a huge variety of domestic carp strains worldwide. In the present study, we used double digestion restriction site‐associated DNA sequencing to genotype several European common carp strains and showed that they are divided into two distinct groups. One of them includes central European common carp strains as well as Ponto–Caspian wild common carp populations, whereas the other group contains several common carp strains that originated in the Soviet Union, mostly as cold‐resistant strains. We believe that breeding with wild Amur carp and subsequent selection of the hybrids for resistance to adverse environmental conditions was the attribute of the second group. We assessed the contribution of wild Amur carp inheritance to the common carp strains and discovered discriminating genes, which differed in allele frequencies between groups. Taken together, our results improve our current understanding of the genetic variability of common carp, namely the structure of natural and artificial carp populations, and the contribution of wild carp traits to domestic strains.

Highlights

  • Common carp (Cyprinus carpio) is a species of the Cyprinidae family, which is the largest and most diverse fish family (Nelson, 1995)

  • The common carp was the first fish species to be domesticated in China, around the 5th century BC, at the same time it was being cultivated at the peak of the Roman Empire in Europe (Balon, 2006)

  • The common carp domestication is a fascinating history of breeding and selection of dozens domestic strains with different zootechnical characteristics around the world

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Summary

| INTRODUCTION

Common carp (Cyprinus carpio) is a species of the Cyprinidae family, which is the largest and most diverse fish family (Nelson, 1995). A specific feature of this group is its adaptation to cold To reach this characteristic, domesticated strains were bred with wild Amur carp (C. carpio haematopterus), which inhabits the Amur River on the Russian Far East, and their offspring underwent artificial selection for low-temperature resistance. We marked this domestic group as the Northern carp strain group based on its origin, even if some of these strains are cultivated in southern regions of Russia (e.g., Stavropol and Ukrainian common carp strains). We found several genes with significantly different allele frequency between groups and conducted functional gene set analyses to estimate gene categories, enriched in the gene set that discriminates between strains

| MATERIALS AND METHODS
Findings
| DISCUSSION
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