Abstract

The Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) is an important aquaculture fish. It shows sexual dimorphism in growth, with males growing much faster than females. Thus, production of all-male fingerlings of Mozambique tilapia would improve aquaculture efficiency. However, the lack of accurate sex-specific markers has hampered the mono-sex breeding and the study of the molecular mechanisms of sex determination in this species. Recently, we performed genome sequencing and re-sequencing of female and male Mozambique tilapia and identified the sex chromosome and sex determining region. In the present study, two sex-linked SNP markers were identified and validated. Male specific contigs were assembled from the unmapped reads after aligning male re-sequencing data against the published XX genome. Based on these male-specific contigs, three sex-linked DNA markers, Marker-1, Marker-2 and Marker-3, were developed and correctly identified the genetic sex of 16 fish. The universality of these three male-specific markers was then tested in a panel of 144 individuals, which showed a discrepancy of 5.5% (8/144) between genotypic sex and phenotypic sex. In conclusion, we developed three sex-linked markers to identify different sex genotypes in Mozambique tilapia. This study lays a foundation for the establishment of MAS-GMT (marker-assisted selection of genetically male tilapias) technique and sex-controlled breeding of Mozambique tilapia, as well as for the identification of the sex determining gene.

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