A novel sex-specific DNA marker in Columbidae birds

Abstract

That most Columbidae birds have no conspicuous sexual dimorphism often makes it difficult to identify their sex on the basis of external morphology. In the present study, we report a novel sex-specific DNA marker in Columbidae birds. DNA was extracted from one member of this bird group, Streptopelia orientalis ( S. orientalis, oriental turtle dove), and used to identify a female-specific DNA marker using a random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) fingerprinting. One hundred and sixty random primers were used for the RAPD-PCR reactions. When using the OPAV17 primer, a novel 902 bp sex-specific PCR product was amplified from known female birds. This fragment of DNA was cloned and sequenced. Two primers, TurSexOPAV17-F and TurSexOPAV17-R, were designed from the cloned sex-specific sequence, and were successfully used to amplify a 777 bp female-specific fragment using PCR from S. orientalis DNA. This sex-specific marker was also amplified from genomic DNA samples of two other female Columbidae, S. chinensis and Columba livia. Sequence analysis showed that this novel sex-specific marker was highly conserved amongst these three bird species. In contrast, the PCR product was not amplified from male DNA of these species, nor from either sex of the S. chinensis formosa birds. Therefore, we concluded that our novel marker can be used to rapidly and accurately identify the sex of birds from three species of Columbidae.