Abstract
As one of the most economically significant sea cucumber species, Holothuria scabra are naturally distributed in the Indo-West Pacific region and are widely cultural in Southeast Asia. The appearances of female and male H. scabra have no obvious phenotypic dimorphism. Thus, identification of sex-specific markers and establishment of sex detection methods are beneficial to artificially induced reproduction and genetic breeding in this species. In this study, a total of 26 male-specific and 9 female-specific sequences were obtained by genomic sequencing with 3 male and 3 female independent samples and a female mixed pool with 10 individuals of H. scabra. After PCR confirmation, two primer pairs (HSM24 and HSM25) for male-specific sequences were found to be true positive for all male individuals. Based on a male-specific marker (GenBank: OP218794), primers were designed for PCR, and loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) methods were further tested on another 30 sex-unknown individuals with DNA samples collected from a nondestructive anal swab method. In this case, the accuracies for PCR and LAMP were approximately 100%. Altogether, this study provided a nondestructive and rapid method for sex identification of H. scabra, which may contribute to the aquaculture of this economic species.
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