Advances in Biological Chemistry, 2013, 3, 440-447 ABC http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/abc.2013.35047 Published Online October 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/abc/) Genetic Variation among various populations of spadefoot toads (Pelobates syriacus, Boettger, 1869) at breeding sites in northern Israel Gad Degani School of Science and Technology, Tel Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, Israel Email:
[email protected] Received 1 August 2013; revised 9 September 2013; accepted 21 September 2013 Copyright © 2013 Gad Degani. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION A genetic study was carried out on spadefoot toads Spadefoot toads (Pelobates syriacus) are distributed in: (Pelobates syriacus) from habitats of various locations Azerbaijan (syriacus), Bulgaria (balcanicus), Greece and altitudes in northern Israel. Cytochrome b and (balcanicus), Iran (syriacus), Iraq (syriacus), Israel 12S were amplified by PCR for the analysis of genetic (syriacus), Lebanon (syriacus), Romania (balcanicus), variation based on five DNA polymorphisms and for Russia (syriacus), Syria (syriacus) and Turkey (syriacus). RAPD PCR. The nucleotide sequences of the mito- They belong to Pelobatidae, with only one genus, Pelo- chondrial DNA fragments were determined from a bates, which contains four species [1-3]. Dzukic et al. [3] 460 bp clone of cytochrome b and a 380 bp clone of reported that the distribution range of P. syriacus in the 12S (GenBank accession numbers, FJ595199-FJ59- Balkans is much larger than the previously known, rather 5203). No genetic variation was found among the compact but disjunctive.