Biology 3466B Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Molecular Genetics, Inbreeding Depression, Population Bottleneck
25 Aug 2013
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Document Summary
Conservation genetics is defined as the application of population genetic theory and techniques to study population size in threatened species, with the ultimate goal of providing solutions to those problems. Many concepts in conservation genetics that derive from principles of population genetics include: Genetic drift in the case of small populations. Reduction in gene flow in the case of small, fragmented populations. Inbreeding depression in the case of small populations. The sequencing of dna to resolve taxonomic uncertainties and identify management units. The greater prairie chicken inhabited what was once a vast prairie and now remains a very threatened habitat due to farming. After the invention of the steel plow among other things, the total population of the greater prairie chicken plummeted from around 25,000 to about 50 in the last decade. This forced the population in illinois into a genetic bottleneck whereby the small population size experienced a severe effect of genetic drift.
