Abstract

Tilapia is an important farmed freshwater fish in Malaysia. Freshwater aquaculture production statistics showed that tilapia topped the list for several years. On the choice of colour, the Malaysian aquaculture industry has always preferred the red hybrids. Statistically, red tilapia represented 86% of the total local tilapia production. One of the constraints faced by the industry is seed stock quality. There are quite a number of private hatcheries in Malaysia producing tilapia fingerlings and not much is known about their quality with respect to their genetic variability. There are self-claims by certain hatcheries that their red tilapia fingerlings have better growth performance than others. It is believed that these strains were sourced from outside the country. Thus, we have attempted to evaluate stocks used for a genetic improvement program by assessing their relationship using microsatellite markers. Twenty pairs of primers were tested on four study populations and one standard population, which were PKPS (PS), Bentong (BT), Enggor (EG), Negeri Sembilan (NS), and Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia (GIFT) Tilapia (GT) as the standard population. The GIFT population referred to is a Nile tilapia stock. Their dendrogram relationship showed that the heterozygosity value was the highest at more than 50% which indicated the presence of high genetic variability. Moreover the Bentong populations clustered the furthest with the highest genetic distance in relation to the other four populations.

Key words: Tilapia, microsatellite, population genetics