DNA fingerprinting in roe deer using the digoxigenated probe (GTG)5

Summary The digoxigenin‐labelled oligonucleotide (GTG)5 was used as a multilocus probe to detect hypervariable microsatellites in roe deer DNA digested with Hae III. The resulting fingerprints of 24 animals belonging to four subpopulations were characterized with regard to within‐subpopulation as well as between‐subpopulation similarity. The mean number of polymorphic fragments was 20 and the average band‐sharing rate for unrelated animals 0.27. A mean probability of 91.5% for a fragment to be present in the heterozygous state was evaluated and the probabilities of identical band patterns in unrelated individuals were estimated to be in the range 1.3 X 10‐16 ‐ 2.5 X 10‐18. Though band‐sharing rates of animals belonging to different subpopulations (range 0.18‐0.24) were lower than those of within‐subpopulations, several measures of population subdivision and the genetic distance do not reveal a striking differentiation of the subpopulations studied.